Why Microsoft?
A colleague of mine was once IT manager of a Fortune 500 company. His job was to look after the IT needs of a couple of thousand users - email, productivity suites, business applications. During his tenure he migrated everything to Microsoft: from Domino to Exchange, from Apache and WebSphere to IIS, from Oracle to MS SQL Server.
What about open source products? Wouldn’t a company save millions of dollars in licensing fees by using open source?
According to him, the decision to move to Microsoft was prompted by the nightmare of finger-pointing whenever he wanted to solve a problem. Vendor A would blame Vendor B, Vendor B would blame Vendor C, and Vendor C would blame Vendor A. Love triangle without the love.
So now with everything on Microsoft, if there’s a problem he would simply call in the MS guy. Having no one else to blame the MS guy would have to solve it, one way or another. Basically, things get done.
How about vendor lock-in? Yes, but it’s Microsoft. Just like not using public transport to go to work, everyone else is doing it, so we’re all complicit.
So Microsoft may be completely irrelevant to Web 2.0-startup types, but they’ll continue to be around for the foreseeable future. For the simple reason that they have an integrated set of products and there’s only one number to call when something goes wrong. And, for IT managers, it’s not their own money they’re spending, but it is their jobs on the line.
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