@caffiend said:
Recent strategic decisions made by Microsoft regarding the direction of their future operating system and database platforms are really frustrating. They’ve announced that they’re shifting focus away from the traditional desktop, in pursuit of Apple in an attempt at recapturing the consumer market, with a heavy emphasis on the tablet space.
Whilst this may seem like a sensible approach to their own business, it isn’t sensible for our business, which unfortunately relies on their platform.Just try and use the new server operating system. THE UI IS DESIGNED FOR A TABLET.... but this is a SERVER.... A SERVER... why is there a tablet oriented UI on A SERVER!!! This thing is only ever used remotely.... from a PC, not a tablet.
Taking a step back, has anyone asked why there are those embarrassing pictures of signage in times-square showing the windows BSOD? Windows (as a general purpose consumer OS) hardly seems like the most appropriate platform to be using for signage. Why not an embedded system, or a more light-weight operating system, or maybe even a Mac? The answer is that those signs run windows because the platform was familiar to the people who built the application. This was Microsoft’s principal asset until they pissed it away with WPF, WWF and WCF... WTF. Hey, thats what they should call windows 8 (Windows Tablet Framework)
No doubt Windows 8 will pave the way for the linux desktop’s wide-spread adoption in enterprise contexts. Most large corporates I deal with are still running WinXP as their SOE, and the cost of upgrading is high. They didn’t move to Vista because it sucked, and they didn’t move to 7 because it cost too much, and they won't move to Win8 because it’s designed for a tablet, not a desktop and it still costs too much, and they still won’t move to Win7 because it costs too much... Hold on. These days, everything important is a web-app... Hmm... what about Ubuntu? It’s free, It has a browser.... The driver support is getting better... Maybe... Just Maybe....
As a related strategic screw-up, SQL Server 2012’s new licensing model has been enough to motivate our company to retarget our app to PostgreSQL, with plans to migrate all customers using SQL server to Postgress ASAP. SQL Server’s licensing model looks like a last-ditch grab for cash, trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the ‘pseudo enterprise’ market before leaving it for dead. Lets face it, SQL server is a second-rate RDBMS anyway, it lacks the feature-set of Oracle, whilst being every bit as annoying to use. The installer is a joke, it’s high-availability features don’t work, and with the new “per core” licensing in 2012, it’s more expensive than Oracle for typical use-cases.
PostgreSQL has proper support for multi-master replication FOR FREE... SQL Server does a crappy job (it doesn’t really work, it’s so complicated that even MS couldn’t set it up correctly at their TechED workshop and told those who attended to “pretend it worked”). If you think i’ll make my customers pay money for something that I pretended worked, you’ve lost the plot.
But then again, you put a tablet oriented UI on a server. so WTF.
Ignorance is not stupidity, and knowledge is not intelligenge.
However, stupidity leads to lack of knowledge and long term ignorance.
Your post is a big WTF, would read again.