> Of course they [MSFT] have a less stellar history of support.
Microsoft supported products:
Azure - six years, .Net & Active Directory - thirteen years, SQL Server - seventeen years, Visual Studio - nineteen years, and Excel - twenty nine years.
> Myth? MS built a very successful business on it.
It's also an unsustainable business. How long do you think MS will be able to maintain backward full compatibility? 100 years? 200 years?
> Customers don't care why your software just broke or whose fault it was, all they care about is it broke.
Customers aren't engineers; they don't know better. We do. In any, it's going to be cheaper to abandon the stubborn customers than it will be to maintain decades worth of backward compatibility, at some point.
> Do you want to support two major versions of your software for years? No? Well neither does Microsoft
Maybe they shouldn't have promised support until 2020 then. I don't mind Microsoft reducing support periods for new releases, but dropping support mid-cycle for systems that are already out there is ridiculous.
> Microsoft has proven skills in building/launching/supporting products, and clear capabilities to cater things into the enterprise/B2B market, including customer support for all levels.
I take offence at this. They tell everyone 6 months before something is launched how good it's going to be, release crap and spend a year fixing it, then it limps along in a bug ridden mess for years while their reps (via partner support / connect) make promises about fixing stuff that will never be kept and then it gets evolved into another product or rebrand or shitcanned or all your cases get disposed of when they change how they're structured internally.
Been working for MS partners and enterprises that use their crap for 25 years. This is the status quo and no one complains too hard because they assume this is right and normal. It's not.
> Enterprise software companies also generally provide long-term support and backward compatibility
Honest question for anyone familiar with enterprise SAAS contracts: does the same apply?
I mean sure, I have seem MS/Oracle provide crazy-long support for some of their software offerings, but if MS decided one day to pivot away from Teams, is there any clauses in the 365 contracts that prevent them from just shutting down the servers?
> Maybe not excel on its own but I imagine office is already its own org inside Microsoft.
You are correct, it has been its own org for a long time.
I don’t see the decoupling from the rest of MSFT ever happening though. Working with some of the Office codebase and some adjacent ones years ago, it is so tightly coupled on a technical level to many other MSFT products, it is pretty much impossible to separate. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that there is some level of Xbox code integration within Office, and I am only halfway joking here.
AD integration alone is so fundamental, without it the whole product starts falling apart. Hell, some of the code in SharePoint has hard dependencies on rather ancient Skype/Lync code, and some pieces of core functionality code are still hanging onto files that were last touched 10+ years ago. It was kind of a bittersweet feeling to have to edit a piece of code and reading comments, and then realizing that the most recent changes to it were submitted by your manager around a decade ago, back when they were just starting out their career as a software dev.
And let’s not even talk about Teams, which has its fangs set extremely deep all over Office products (and beyond).
> I also think MS is quite capable of and does produce good software be it their own OS, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Word, Excel, Flight Simulator etc. etc.
> Everyone keeps jumping on Microsoft, but Microsoft is not the problem.
Actually, moving to a more managed environment (so Azure and SaaS instead of hosting your own stuff) might make it better since MS can and will patch their own servers rapidly.
A bit more than a few years. They still have pretty good profits (Windows and Office are still quite popular,) and even if that dried up suddenly and they had zero revenue, they could quite literally live on their cash reserves for a decade.
> Windows Server takes most of the profit in the web server market. SQL Server does very well even with PostgreSQL and MySQL being given away for free. They compete with free as in beer offerings and keep making a ton of money.
Sales network is something entirely different than technical capabilities. Especially, when half of Microsoft is sales force.
Yes, there are companies using Microsoft products and Microsoft is getting paid very well for that. However, these companies are not on forefront of computing and are not considered to be top companies in the area of cutting edge development.
Show me some cutting edge company/startup in the IT sector that is using Microsoft products and is not a statistical error. There is a reason for that.
Sure it is; Microsoft is very heavily invested in a SaaS model now. Of course, some of it is SaaS that is locally installed or at least has a substantial locally installed component, but it's still a SaaS model as opposed to a physical media with attached no-interaction perpetual license model.
> MS earned a reputation for the battleship; relatively stable, plays nicely with their other products, LTS, backward compatibility, etc.
Microsoft earned thst reputation with a lot of development and organizational practices that they've since abandoned. It may take people a while to notice, but today's Microsoft is not prioritizing stable software interfaces and backwards compatability.
It took a lot of testing to ensure existing software and hardware continued to work with new operating systems, and they're not doing as much testing anymore.
Microsoft supported products: Azure - six years, .Net & Active Directory - thirteen years, SQL Server - seventeen years, Visual Studio - nineteen years, and Excel - twenty nine years.
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