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Comment by surfingdino | Hacker News Reader

The larger the org the slower they are with updates. Some global companies skip one or two versions of Windows because of the time it takes them to upgrade their systems. Microsoft is trying to deflect the blame, but it is their policy of maintaining backward compatibility that bit them. If you tell enterprise they can run their software on the latest version of your OS there is no incentive to upgrade, because they can always do it later. Steve Jobs knew how enterprise clients think from his time at NeXT and killed Apple's enterprise division when he came back. When large customers pushed him to create enterprise sales and support team he told them to go the nearest Apple Store, because he did not want them to limit his ability to change the OS.

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Well, that is why Apple is meaningless on the enterprise server room, and all their attempts at it flopped.

That’s not why. It was overpriced and didn’t have a lot of software.

Linux distros make changes and they ate Microsoft’s lunch in the server room.

It was overpriced and didn’t have a lot of software.

That's not how I remember it at all. Apple XServers cost about the same as the competition and the XServer RAID was a bargain compared to similar hardware offerings at the time. And although I never used the software, based on the demos I saw from their sales team, it looked really nice and I never heard anybody complain about it. The aversion wasn't price or software, it was just that people didn't really trust Apple support and service.

Wtf are you talking about? If you never used any software that ran on it, you’re completely unqualified to evaluate it.

My point is that I worked at a couple of different places that where considering XServer RAID setups, and as part of that I read everything I could find, attended live presentations of the hardware and talked to people online who where using XServers. And in that process found no reason to write off the hardware of purely software grounds. If you worked extensively with the software and found it a deal breaker, then I'll defer to your experience, but at the time I didn't run into anybody with anything overly bad to say about the software.

UNIX free beer eats Microsoft licenses on the server room.

Which is quite a different point.

Naturally Apple's UNIX flavour came with Apple's tax, and not free beer one, as an additional bump, besides the software policies.

Also note that the chaos on the desktop from was caused by 1% of the Windows desktop market share.

The Year of Desktop Linux with its 2% is nowhere closer to be used in such critical infrastructure.

The price was secondary. The ecosystem for windows was just garbage for web, VM, container, etc stacks. Much like they missed the boat on mobile, they missed the boat on transitioning to cattle from pets.

Case in point, Linux ate Microsoft in the university datacenters where Microsoft was literally giving it away for free.

That was secondary to startups using Linux, because they could not afford Microsoft and because at the time IIS was as tight as a sieve. Demand for people with knowledge of Linux drove Linux adoption at universities.

Hardly a case in point, UNIX has always been universities baby, it is thanks to them that it actually had a life outside Bell Labs.

How is that not a case in point? Cost is irrelevant and people chucked that shit to the side.

Also, you’re mixing up the early days of UNIX with Linux, which were essentially decades apart. I watched Linux eat the entire campuses of universities and replace windows in the early 2000s. The UNIX and BSD life support cycle you are talking about is irrelevant shit from computer science departments where windows was never welcome but the scale was constrained to the department.

Not in Eastern Europe or India where Microsoft was giving away a ton of licenses. The students rejected them anyway.

That isn't the information I have from our offshoring partners.

Your offshoring partners are ignorant. There is no equivalent partner representing open source.

You’re living in a denial zone where you think something is winning because there is no competitor making more money. The reality is people realized they didn’t need to pay at all and moved on with 10-100x the scale outside of the garden of stupidity.

> Linux distros make changes and they ate Microsoft’s lunch in the server room.

This statement is a little funny considering the only reason the CrowdStrike situation was such a big deal was because of how many high-profile companies are using Windows Server.

Why is that funny? They can lose 75% of their market share and still have millions of deployments.

You wouldn't want to live to see the day when the same situation happens on Linux servers.

Not only it already happened, the world hardly noticed as the systems got affected, given the lack of relevance on the affected systems.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/21/crowdstrike_linux_cra...

Noone noticed because most Linux servers does not run Crowdstrike Falcon. If the same number of Linux servers as Windows servers were affected, most of the Internet would have been down.

Crowdstrike is not relevant on Linux systems. don’t get it confused.

The AWS stats are very clear, Microsoft is way behind in the server world.

Crowdstrike literally disrupted Linux systems this year. Are you arguing that it isn't widely deployed enough to be relevant?

They tried to enter that market a couple of times with MacOS and AIX, but ultimately abandoned it. They are happy making their hardware pluggable into corporate networks. It's your choice, if you want it.

Still, it flopped.

Microsoft wants you to upgrade and support ends for old version for precisely that reason, to get the customers to pay (like SAP's model). I don't think MS will ever tell a customer go ahead use a unsupported older version, from both a liability perspective and wanting to make the sale perspective. If Delta wanted to cheap out, don't blame the vendor

On the other hand, Microsoft will sell you “extended security updates” for your out of support OS. Third hand information, but I was told the cost was something like $100/seat year one, $200/seat year two, etc.

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning.

If backward compatibility actually was that great and clients actually believed it, why would they wait around for ages before upgrading? It should be a no-brainer.

Instead, what I've seen in practice, is that people are very much afraid their random crap will break. They absolutely don't believe the backwards compatibility is a thing, at least not without "testing".

The company I work for has a bunch of software that the providers only "support" on versions of windows server that are at least one or two steps behind current. Hell, I've even seen this for things which seemed pretty basic (think random web app) running inside a JVM.

I don't personally use windows all that much, so don't really have first-hand experience, but my impression is that people are very much afraid of upgrades, even when running pretty "basic" things (as in "office software", not things which manipulate low-level, old interfaces or similar)

Actually NeXT flubbed enterprise sales because they didn't ensure that their OS was fully POSIX-compliant. POSIX-compliant OSes didn't need special waivers in order for the Federal govt to buy them; that is why the CIA and NSA were NeXT's main customers, because no one requires spy agencies to buy COTS software.

If Jobs had spent just 2 engineer-years or less of engineering time to fix POSIX compliance, their market would have been many times larger; something HP's workstation division and Sun were very happy about, I am sure!

For NeXT, as Apple, the POSIX/UNIX story has always been the same as on Windows, a means to bring the ecosystem into the platform, not to make software there and deploy it elsewhere.

There is even a surviving video from a NeXT meeting, where Steve Jobs talks about this strategy.

Huh? I don't see how MS has any blame in any of this. Client chooses not to upgrade systems. Client chooses to use crowdstrike as a vendor. Client chooses not to accept free support. At what point was MS supposed to do something here? There are loads of things to complain about or take issue with when it comes to MS, but I don't see how this is one of them.

Essentially, he is stating being good at backward compatibility is the problem :-/

Comment seems to imply it's MS fault for maintaining backward compatibility

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