Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset(padgeblog.com) |
Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset(padgeblog.com) |
Then the people you work with are a edge case minority.
Windows absolutely and completely dominates the desktop computer landscape in both enterprise and home. Most estimates have it at 90-95% penetration worldwide vs mac/nix.
For anyone who may say macs are now selling more than ever before and that MS is losing market share fast, remember that apple is not even in the top 5 for computer manufacturers. For every Mac computer sold, there is 90+ Windows equipped computers.
While MS may be in trouble in the phone/tablet market, they still are on extremely solid footing in the desktop market. The question just becomes, what will become a desktop computer in 5 years. Will we all abandon what it is currently and move to tablets?
Which is to say, paying attention to the mass of office workers does not tell you something about the direction of the software world, it tells you about what dogfood is being forced onto the workers at this moment in time.
It's at this point that we look at what the majority of dogfood buyers are buying and realize that the influence of software developers is probably less than the influence of the people buying the software (sorry for restating the obvious there).
Anyway, the point, if I have one, is that the mass of office workers probably does tell you something about the direction of the software world -- and in fact, if we consider the net worth of IBM, Oracle, SAP, CSK, MSFT, Intuit, Autdesk, etc.; we might find we are at odds about where the 'tremendous' influence is coming from, if there is any such thing as 'tremendous' influence at all.
I would bet on Windows being well over 90% still. Remember Microsoft sells worldwide, not just to silicon valley. How many programmers in China do you think use Macs?
If you include tablets with computer sales (a line MS seems eager to blur) then Apple is the #1 computer manufacturer in the world at 14.6% of market share. HP is #2 with 14.1% of combined computer and tablet market share.
Latest peer-reviewed stats I could find:
In August 2011, Gartner estimated Apple's PC market share in US as 10.7% for Q2 2011. Apple's worldwide market share is not listed, because it is not in the list of top 5 computer manufacturers, and is inferred to be 5% or lower.
That suggests a lower than 1:90 ratio for worldwide, at 1:95
Im sure that there are many mac-fanboy stat posts showing more penetration but the fact is, they simply are -not- shipping anything near the levels you are talking about. Apple is a public company and you can simply see their numbers vs just one or two US shippers (HP/Dell) - Never mind the overseas producers.
Since we could access the directory from perl it was easy to make a simple UI for the support team to make changes.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see Active Directory as being that big of an advantage over OpenLDAP. If your company is small, you'll do fine without any central directory. If it's large, the cost of implementing and supporting OpenLDAP should be less than the cost of the CALs for Active Directory.
Eventually, after I started managing IT, with all of the Windows Systems, and Exchange Servers, and Users - AD just infected us, and it's really hard to get out of your life. For a while, it was Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), but being able to control whether people can login to their laptop/desktop/VPN/Email/etc... through AD is just so much easier when you have a lot of windows systems. Also - Group Polices, ACLs on things like Printers, File Systems, and other Resources - and now with Lync starting to pop up....
If you can live without Microsoft Exchange, and you don't have a lot of windows laptops, you can probably avoid it - but, AD really is the competitive weapon that Microsoft continues to be able to wield to keep themselves in the heart of a lot of IT environments.
Would love to go run an environment/company that had a pure-play LDAP server like OpenLDAP, Netscape/Fedora/389 Directory server, or, OpenDS.
LDAP goes out of the way to be complicated. Ad is nicely packaged, clicky, clicky, and "anyone" can manage it.
That's where MS makes its money. People are expensive.
"All in all, the Halo franchise has made nearly $3 billion from sales."
"Halo: Reach, Halo creator Bungie's last Halo game, made more than $200 million in sales in the US and Europe in the first 24 hours of release. This figure eclipsed all previous 2010 US entertainment launches, including the three-day opening weekends of Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland and Toy Story 3."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-10-31-more-than-46-mi...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/12/us-microsoft-halo-...
Almost every single hour of my time working with an enterprise customer involves dealing with AD or related Microsoft products in some fashion.
In the enterprise, I almost always deploy to windows products, over the preferred linux+postgres+apache stack, because the business has already invested in resources to manage Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and IIS, in conjunction with AD. Configuration tends to be more platform agnostic, as the applications are Java based, however the number of gotchas that seem to crop up around the Microsoft products make it a big enough pain.
It's unfortunate that the link to AD so often blossoms out to the entire infrastructure stack, as the products are in many ways inferior to their open source relatives, but the momentum, support and resources are already there and it doesn't look like changing anytime soon.
Also, I had to check to see if 'blogosphere' was coined prior to 2001, and found that indeed it was.
Being able to make changes to a document (collaboratively too) from an iPad or an Android device, while commuting, is the definition of awesomeness.
Google Apps does not have a viable solution because it is not in house. There is no easy way to extend the schema and integrating with Google Apps is actually quite difficult. There are tools to help you integrate from Active Directory to Google Apps but not the other way around.
Also Active Directory is actually pretty awesome from a management standpoint. Suppose today you wanted to have 50k linux boxes with all the same logins. You would probably use LDAP (which is essentially AD under the hood). But how about automatic package management per user? How do you configure that? AD has all this built in and more.
This is false. LDAP itself is nothing more than a protocol (that's what the P stands for). There are very popular implementations of this protocol (OpenLDAP being just one) but even they are not "AD under the hood".
AD = LDAP + Kerberos + Microsoft proprietary extensions
So if anything, under the hood of AD you will find LDAP, but not the other way around.
They were using IE6 all the way up until 2010, finishing the deploy of IE8 two years after it was released. :/
I like the author's main point and I agree with it without hesitation, but I can't support the supporting arguments. Especially considering Microsoft is still a huge success in the desktop market (a market that isn't quite as dead as some seem to call it).
XAD was sold to Novell in 2007 and was rebranded Domain Services for Windows. I haven't really followed its progress since; of course, Samba4 is also now an effective Active Directory replacement.
I would say, though, that claiming that IE and Bing advertising is "wasted" is pretty bold. Sure, OSD hasn't started turning a profit yet, but there is something to be said about Bing having ~30% market share and the fact that if Bing did not exist, Google would almost certainly have a complete monopoly on search today. The data generated from Bing and the Bing ecosystem is incredibly valuable, but Bing Ads have yet to unlock the full revenue potential unfortunately. Consider, though, that Google and Microsoft are the only two companies that have the unbelievably valuable asset that is an index of the entire (within reason) web.
So not exactly throwing money down the drain.
On Search, Bing has a lower profit margin than Google.
Apple's model is good for making money as a smaller player. Bing's is not.
But yes, AD is king in most enterprises. Definitely one of Microsoft's most important assets.
And that can be said with way less text. Like I just did.
Insert below mandatory answer about how great existing open-source solutions are.
So it's happening, even if it's just a trickle at the moment.
LDAP is a protocol, it is not a standalone service. Don't you also need a client-side authentication mechanism and server-side sharing system that is seemlessly compatible with LDAP?
Does Google Apps for Business (i.e. http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/ ) have a viable solution for the corporate directory, or do they just expect you to use a third-party solution like Microsoft Active Directory?
I couldn't care less
"I could care less." - There is room for you to care less than you care now. This phrase is meaningless as a way to describe how much you care about something.
Yes, its irritating, like not using the apostrophe correctly :-)
Settings from domain controllers (privileges etc) are propagated over the network to other servers (Email,File servers etc).
So when you authenticate against a DC (by logging into your workstation etc) you get a token back which can be sent to other hosts on the network who then understand what to grant access to based on that token.
This makes it easier for a large org with an international presence to allow say marketing teams in the London and New York offices to have access to the same files etc and be able to use each others workstations interchangeably whilst all being managed by the IT team in Mumbai.
This means that if you stick to mainly MS products you get the advantage of knowing that everything will integrate into AD so you spend less time handrolling shared authentication etc.
ADFS is hugely under-rated, and is arguably the most capable identity federation software out there because it's the only implementation I know of that does both passive- (browser-based), and active federation, which allows you to authenticate against AD from your JSON service.
That story gets even better with U-Prove (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/twc/endtoendtrust/vision/upr...).
However, the big problem Microsoft faces is that one reason Office is popular is because of piracy, which is like this freakishly big elephant in the room. I can bet that most home users that use Office do not have a license for it - I've seen this happening with small to medium businesses too in my country at least.
And for a small to medium business, what makes more sense? Shelling out the cash for Office licenses or going with a completely free and legal alternative? Considering most such businesses don't actually need Exchange integration or other niceties that MS Office provides, the choice is pretty obvious under the threat of being caught.
And this is the big problem for MS Office - it's an awesome software package, but judging relatively to its upfront cost to home users or small/medium businesses? Well, the extra value provided starts to fade in comparison to a $0 price tag.
I think this situation could change rapidly, but MSFT has the momentum, and I could also see Office remaining out in front. It's difficult to imagine someone coming along and supplanting Excel with something superior at the moment.