You have a better, equally integrated solution?
I mean, we do. Linux OS, Libre Office, Apache servers, Linux Cloud Service of Choice, PostgreSQL.
But you need techs familiar with those systems and businesses eager to implement Linux at a foundational level early on in the company’s development. Because a lot of businesses outsource their IT early on, and because a lot of end-user hardware has Microsoft pre-installed, and because the major IT outsourcers all get big kickbacks from Microsoft to be the default solutions, and because Microsoft has embedded itself at the university level at a global scale, and because Microsoft has successfully lobbied itself as the premier US contractor of choice for federal and state IT setups, it can be harder to find professionals willing and able to configure a Linux environment. This is assuming the company founders even think to ask for alternatives.
That’s not to say it never happens. FFS, some of the biggest competitors to Microsoft - Amazon and Google most notably - have relied on Linux/PostgreSQL architecture to keep their overhead low and their integrations non-exclusive. But they’re exceptional precisely because they laid the groundwork early.
The problem isn’t that integrated solutions don’t exist. The problem is that most CTOs don’t embrace them early on in the company’s development and find themselves trapped in the Microsoft ecosystem well after the point a transition would be economical.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Some of your emphasis is a little backwards. In the cloud computing environment, Amazon is bigger than Microsoft, and windows isn’t even particularly significant. Azure primarily provides Linux infrastructure instead of Windows. AWS is bigger in the government cloud sector than Microsoft.
For servers, Linux is hands down the os of choice. It’s just not even close. Where Microsoft has an edge is in business software, like Excel, word, desktop OS and exchange. Needing windows server administrators for stuff like that is a pain when you already have Linux people for the rest of your stuff which is why it gets outsourced so often. It’s not central to the business so no sense in investing in people for it.
Microsoft isn’t dominating the commercial computing sector, they’re dominating the office it sector, which is a cost center for businesses. They’re trailing badly in the revenue generation service sphere. That’s why they’ve been shifting towards offering their own hosting for their services, so you can reduce costs but keep paying them. Increased interoperability between windows and Linux from a developer standpoint to drive people towards buying their Linux hosting from them, because you can use vscode to push your software to GitHub and automatically deploy to azure when build and test passes.
Being on the cost side of the ledger is a risk for them, so they’re trying to move to the revenue side, where windows just doesn’t have the grip.