It's a preview party at Microsoft, but do you really want an invite? Microsoft has a very long history, but the company's attention span seems to be shrinking, which is making it difficult to decide which products have a future and which might be shot behind the shed. It's a longstanding problem for developers. While product development and tech updates were relatively stable towards the end of …
Stop jumping like lemmings whenever Borzilla hitches up the skirt.
Give it time, like five years. Then go check if the product is still there, if it has been finalized, if it is actually useful. Get off the treadmill you don't control.
It is high time Borkzilla leans that, if it is not making useful product, it won't get the greenbacks.
I'm posting this as somebody who isn't really a Microsoft fan - but in their defence...
I recently did an elearning course in Azure. We don't use it at our workplace but I was curious to learn about it especially seeing how frequently it comes up in job ads. For the most part I was genuinely impressed and think it does have a lot to offer.
I haven't used Windows in 9 years so can't comment.
But then what else is Microsoft known for? Office. I was quite shocked to find that there are something like 11 times more users of Google Workspace than Office. Is this actually true? If so then surely at some point they're going to ditch that. Is it just the worlds reliance on Excel keeping that alive?
I suspect that depends how one defines "users", as ever. I'm probably counted as a user of the Google stuff, as I occasionally look at documents generated by other people in it, and I use a Google Sheets macro to manipulate Google Mail items in bulk, but I'm predominantly a Microsoft Office user for my main work.
I suspect that anyone with a Google Mail or Google Drive account is being counted as a user of Google Workspace.
GJC
I’m an IT contractor so I’ve moved between a significant number of (Australian) businesses. I know of only one large organisation that uses Google rather than Microsoft for its productivity suite. If you have new professional or office staff, you can assume they will already know Microsoft, but will need training in Google if that’s what you want to use as your corporate standard. That’s why Microsoft is embedded in larger businesses and government agencies. Total cost, not just platform cost.
A lot of tech companies use Google Workspace rather than MS365, especially in the U.S. MS has a strong foothold in legacy businesses, often because someone bought into some proprietary software built on top of MS Office.
I work for a a kind of tech provider with several large and very large clients in Europe and the U.S, and I had to work with both stacks (MS365/Azure and GWS/GCP). And while on paper Azure (which is currently being renamed Entra) has some great capabilities, the reality is that the whole software stack is build from something akin to toilet roll cores and bubble gum. Managing Azure is a PITA because the various interfaces are all different and spread across the different products, and not only do controls often not work as expected but Microsoft is also busy re-arranging the UX every other week. So instead of a single control pane for a function, you often have two of which one has the first half of settings broken and the other the second half of settings. It's a cluster-fork.
And then there's the fact that Azure is the cloud with the most unplanned outages and the worst security related fork-ups. Which also explains the renaming.
GCP (and GWS) have been pretty steady in comparison, the UX is a lot more consistent, and things tend to just work. And Google services have shown to be pretty resilient compared to MS365/Azure, and Google has beefed up security a lot after it suffered an embarrassing hack back in 2011 or so.
Over the last few years, we had several clients dropping MS365 for Google Workspace and going for Chromebooks instead of Windows laptops, also because most modern business and many engineering apps are already web based. In all cases the result was a massive drop in support calls and overall IT expenditure, also because all the babying that the various parts of Microsoft software required (such as preparing OS images and freeing them of all the consumer crap and ads) was now gone. And not all Chromebooks are used for simple office work, many clients gavce high-end models to their engineers and software developers who develop all kinds of stuff on these things.
What is MS known for? Or, what makes it so widespread?
Here's the big ones:
User side:
Outlook
Then...
Office
With Teams a solid but distant third
Enterprise side:
Active Directory, now morphing to Azure and InTune
Dynamics
Sharepoint
and of course, Server
Of course, it's all more complicated than that, but these are the highlights.
Basically, don't trust Microsoft (or any Tech Company for that matter) for any work tools. If you put all of "your eggs in one basket", you will come a cropper. Microsoft/Google etc are not interested in your job/company, only theirs and their bottom line and obscene profits/pay check.
Yes, but consider that principle “Don't invest in a Microsoft product in which Microsoft itself is lessening its investment”. It seems to be applying to Windows itself these days, what with the deteriorating quality of updates and patches.
People still use that??? Augh…. please go away already. Real MS-SQL, if you must stay in Redmond’s orbit, or any of the OSS alternatives. Even Excel is better.
Project is kinda meh, Excel (or any Scrum/Kanban tool, including actual whiteboard w/Post-its) can do 80% of its job. But don’t kill Visio please, unless you release the source.
Yes indeed people still use it. Why do they use it? Because it's extremely easy to knock up a simple in-house desktop database-backed application without the insane levels of complexity involved in doing the same thing on modern .Net or as a web application leveraging (insert this month's trendy Javascript stack here).
What gets me is that there clearly is demand for what MS Access offers (a simple desktop database), yet there isn't really anything else like it (there's Filemaker which is good but it's 3x the price of an MS Access license; there's also LibreOffice Base but that is still a dis-functional mess based on HSQL and Java, while the move to Firebird that was announced some 7 years ago still hasn't happened).
SQLite is the best little DBMS in the world. It just gets going at the point where Access hits its limits.
Note also that LibreOffice Base (the approximate Access-equivalent) is not a DBMS in its own right, but a GUI frontend to a DBMS. It supports MySQL as standard, and I think there is a plugin somewhere for SQLite. And either one of those backends is more capable than Access.
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