Not trying to say capitalists should receive anything good, but why would any profit-seeking corporation load windows into either their business computers or sale computers?
I’ve heard most servers use Linux, why wouldn’t they use Linux for their mainline stuff as well? I mean, I’ve heard before how corporations seek short-term profit over long-term profit, but what kind of short-term profits are gained from literally just bricking 99% of your infrastructure because your commitment to Microsoft is more than your commitment to recipient stable profits?
Ig it’s just another case in “Capitalism sucks and even for the very little it actually produces / makes good, it will easily reverse course given enough time.”
In the corporate world, Microsoft Office is treated as a defacto standard. If your clients / contractors / suppliers use it, you use it to ensure nothing gets lost in translation. Even though LibreOffice is perfectly suitable for internal use, and compatibility with MS Office is fairly good, nobody wants to risk misinterpreting expensive contractual obligations or engineering specifications on “this spreadsheet will probably function correctly and produce legible graphs.” Same goes with other industrial software like the Adobe Creative Suite, or various CAD/CAM systems. If your client uses SolidWorks, you are using SolidWorks to interpret their models and to verify nothing gets lost when exporting to other formats. Doesn’t even matter if your proprietary non D.P. Systems CAD software is capable of importing a SolidWorks model directly.
As far as Windows itself goes, it is assumed everybody is familiar with Windows and it is deployed to minimize employee training costs, even though the company ends up paying a shit ton for absolutely fucking nothing they get out of it. Training is a waste of money. Replacing legacy systems which are “still working” is a waste of money. Migrating a multidisciplinary organization is a complex project with many potential stumbling blocks which can be avoided by doing nothing until the next global bootloop incident.
I’ve worked advising tech for large companies snd this is pretty much my experience, too. Then, you have a non-technical issue that can really tip the scales: enterprise tech (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc) has an army of salespeople who range from fully technical evangelists that will tell you how good the tool is, to complete sleaze bags who only use PowerPoint and will promise the world in order to get a sale.
These companies overpromise so much it verges on false advertising, and they have these multi-year migration, implementation and support deals that unless you have a resident IT nerd who you know will stay for years at your firm, and who for some reason is really invested in using free software, will never be matched by any non-private alternative.
The amount of resources these companies spend on marketing and sales could run whole teams of open source projects several times over.
Plus, most corporate leadership, even those in technical roles, are salespeople (good salespeople raise to the top because corporations select for the hegemonic ideal of person, who incidentally fits well into sales) so when a tech company salesperson comes it’s pretty much
The amount of resources these companies spend on marketing and sales could run whole teams of open source projects several times over.
Training as well. Training is huge. Setting Microsoft aside for a moment, there is a very similar dynamic at play in mechanical engineering. These ludicrously expensive CAD/CAM packages sell for thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars per seat. They have slick branding, slick marketing, big-time Fortune 500 clients they can point to. They are legitimately more capable and refined than Free Software alternatives, but by an ever-shrinking margin. We’re at the point where we can do FEM (material deformation under load) and CFM (fluid dynamics) and 3 axis milling in FreeCAD. It is perfectly suitable for a lot of general mechanical engineering applications at this point. Sure, your models will explode every now and then, but what the proprietary marketing materials don’t tell you is that the same thing will happen on their expensive shit if you are not very methodical about how you construct your models.
What they have going for them (much like Adobe) is that aspiring architects, engineers, and industrial designers go to college and learn THEIR software, and run into most of these problems before they hit the proper workforce. Then they might intern under the wings of experience engineers who have spent 20 years figuring out every single way a model will explode in their system. To everyone else, as long as the marketing materials say “state of the art” enough times, it is so.
No Free Software application has this kind of training infrastructure in place. I think in academic settings specifically, there is a major failure when it comes to software training. People learn “How to use Microsoft Word” instead of the bigger picture “How electronic documents are produced, processed, printed, and archived.” There’s a micro-focus on specific software functions and menus and hot-keys instead of taking a step back and investigating multiple ways things can be done, and which might be most appropriate in which situation. What happens when you decide to change the font size in your 300 page manuscript? Does it completely explode? Do you have to change the font independently on all 300 pages? Or did you properly define and use text styles throughout your document? Did you properly use page breaks instead of mashing the Enter key? These are the kind of problems people should be learning to solve, which apply in any word processing system, not how to specifically flip an embedded table in a Word document. It is the same with CAD software. It is micro-focused on specific CAD systems, instead of taking a more general overview of how components like file formats, CAD kernels, algebraic constraint solvers, coordinate and feature reference systems, etc. work. The engineers I work with are good enough at making models and blueprints within the ecosystem, but they keep trying to send me 3D models in IGES format and stuff like that when I need to process them in a third party CAM system. It is clear the CAD training they recieved is extremely application specific.
Migrating a multidisciplinary organization is a complex project with many potential stumbling blocks which can be avoided by doing nothing until the next global bootloop incident.
The capitalist ethos really is “Do nothing to fix anything until absolute disaster happens, and even then, give the absolute bare minimum bandaid solution”, huh?
Windows and Microsoft were short term solutions that cascaded into a decades-long mountain of sunken costs, technical debt, corporate inertia that manifests as vendor lock-in. converting everything from windows and microsoft infra. is a task that could take years for some companies, and only when the alternatives offer revolutionary benefits to their prospective clients.
Also proprietary software. If Microsoft never released visual basic, Windows never would have taken the workstation market from Unix.
There are probably tens of thousands of visual basic scripts still running in legacy infrastructure that’s now wrapped in Azure cloud infrastructure that would take decades to port to the moving target that is Weyland.
There’s also .NET and Visual Studio that lock dev teams into Microsoft.
I use ArcGIS Pro at work, and while their server system runs on Linux, their desktop application is .NET and only runs on Windows. Which means code written for the desktop app won’t work on the Linux server unless there’s a running instance of the Windows binary for it to hook into. So there’s a ton of companies that just have an intern log in occasionally and move the mouse around so the app wakes up and pulls the license key.
Then that interaction is translated through a JavaScript API that has bindings in Python and .NET so you can sync the Linux database server with the Windows desktop replicas and yadda yadda yadda. It’s all so insane now that any minor change will break someone’s workflow that was written to work based on bugs and shit.
1.) tragically, the excel equivalents are not 1-to-1 when it comes to some spreadsheet calculations. like you could probably rebuild them, but they don’t always import cleanly. i am certain microsoft purposely kludges their file compatibility shit together so that open source standards don’t work correctly. they’ve been caught doing this with HTML & CSS, so i am sure they’re doing it purposely internally.
2.) i think microsoft’s enterprise & institutional sales kickback system is probably in the top 3, all time, everyday is the fucking superbowl, lock ‘em in and get the ink down. this is speculation on my end, but having seen their absolute sweetheart licensing system for large universities’ students & staff, the corporate and government sales side has got to be just as marquee, S-tier as that, if not more so. i have no doubt the kickbacks are brilliantly structured so as to be invisible to anyone except the decision making teams.
i think every government agency / organization / state government should have to publicly declare their software licensing fees every year. it is absolutely criminal how much public cash is being funneled to prolong this counter productive dependency and prop up this single repository of proprietary, shit-tier code.
The ecosystem. Loads of specialist hardware and software has been developed just for windows since the 90s. A lot of this is business critical. Replacing hardware/rewriting drivers for Linux (if even possible/legal) and porting or finding alternative software is really expensive.
The free gifts of society. The workforce can by and large use Microsoft products for their productive endeavours. As a result of their education and their previous employment. This skill is expensive to replace with training in another system.
I really think it is just the last one. I would argue that any features which are truly exclusive to Microsoft Office are so niche that they absolutely do not warrant holding back an organizational migration. The vast majority of people are perfectly happy using Google Docs for word processing and simple spreadsheets. For these tasks, any office suite is suitable. The handful of employees doing highly complex workflows in Microsoft Office can be issued machines suitable for the task (though I guarantee they are doing something stupid in Excel which should be done using a database system if anybody in the company gave a shit about investing in their IT infrastructure instead of just letting the accounts receivable clerk invent it whole-cloth in return for a standard performance review and 3% annual raise). Same thing goes for people developing iOS applications (for internal use or for clients and end-users), they get a Mac workstation to run XCode on, obviously. These accommodations can be made without the whole organization depending on using a specific platform. Technological necessity does not explain why they just run Windows and Office on everything they can.
As far as hardware compatibility goes, these PCs should be treated as part of the appliance. If you have something like an RFID badge printer which is only supported on Windows, it obviously gets Windows machine to use as a terminal. Any modestly sized company with an IT staff has a closet full of old laptops and micro-ATX towers perfectly suited for this purpose. There’s no need to reverse engineer the device. You can just stick an Intel NUC next to it and use it as intended, in compliance with the EULA and with the warranty intact. If you have an embedded system based on Windows (as various forms of industrial machinery do), obviously you leave that alone, because the vendor won’t service the machine otherwise. For most office workflows though, dedicated hardware should not be a concern. Again, these decisions aren’t being made out of technical necessity, but because everybody in the 90s was sold on the idea that if they didn’t learn how to write formulas in Excel they would end up operating a deep fryer for eternity - so now it is an abundant and replaceable skill.
Then again, all of that is rendered completely meaningless when your AI-coded OS can just simply self-destruct any given second. But yeah, I get what you’re saying.
Any software can self destruct at any second. The other nice thing about Microsoft is there is (ostensibly at least) a 24/7 large team of competent developers who can work to fix the problem. And failing that a large rich company to sue for damages…
Have you ever had Microsoft business support? Microsoft built my companies data center and left us with a network VM that was single threaded and had memory leaks that we rebooted every week. Over 4 years of working on the team Microsoft at no point ever fixed it and it resulted in the secondary data center getting a fraction of the bandwidth and dropping practically every other packet where we had to chunk and retry data transfers over and over just to get them to move across to the disaster recovery servers.
Microsoft is fucking atrocious for business users as well they’re no different from oracle or ibm who shovel shit for huge license costs then conveniently become unreachable when there’s an issue. Enough money to sue but in the belly of the beast the employee just gets the shit the organisation itself doesn’t care
Not trying to say capitalists should receive anything good, but why would any profit-seeking corporation load windows into either their business computers or sale computers?
I’ve heard most servers use Linux, why wouldn’t they use Linux for their mainline stuff as well? I mean, I’ve heard before how corporations seek short-term profit over long-term profit, but what kind of short-term profits are gained from literally just bricking 99% of your infrastructure because your commitment to Microsoft is more than your commitment to recipient stable profits?
Ig it’s just another case in “Capitalism sucks and even for the very little it actually produces / makes good, it will easily reverse course given enough time.”
In the corporate world, Microsoft Office is treated as a defacto standard. If your clients / contractors / suppliers use it, you use it to ensure nothing gets lost in translation. Even though LibreOffice is perfectly suitable for internal use, and compatibility with MS Office is fairly good, nobody wants to risk misinterpreting expensive contractual obligations or engineering specifications on “this spreadsheet will probably function correctly and produce legible graphs.” Same goes with other industrial software like the Adobe Creative Suite, or various CAD/CAM systems. If your client uses SolidWorks, you are using SolidWorks to interpret their models and to verify nothing gets lost when exporting to other formats. Doesn’t even matter if your proprietary non D.P. Systems CAD software is capable of importing a SolidWorks model directly.
As far as Windows itself goes, it is assumed everybody is familiar with Windows and it is deployed to minimize employee training costs, even though the company ends up paying a shit ton for absolutely fucking nothing they get out of it. Training is a waste of money. Replacing legacy systems which are “still working” is a waste of money. Migrating a multidisciplinary organization is a complex project with many potential stumbling blocks which can be avoided by doing nothing until the next global bootloop incident.
I’ve worked advising tech for large companies snd this is pretty much my experience, too. Then, you have a non-technical issue that can really tip the scales: enterprise tech (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc) has an army of salespeople who range from fully technical evangelists that will tell you how good the tool is, to complete sleaze bags who only use PowerPoint and will promise the world in order to get a sale.
These companies overpromise so much it verges on false advertising, and they have these multi-year migration, implementation and support deals that unless you have a resident IT nerd who you know will stay for years at your firm, and who for some reason is really invested in using free software, will never be matched by any non-private alternative.
The amount of resources these companies spend on marketing and sales could run whole teams of open source projects several times over.
Plus, most corporate leadership, even those in technical roles, are salespeople (good salespeople raise to the top because corporations select for the hegemonic ideal of person, who incidentally fits well into sales) so when a tech company salesperson comes it’s pretty much
Training as well. Training is huge. Setting Microsoft aside for a moment, there is a very similar dynamic at play in mechanical engineering. These ludicrously expensive CAD/CAM packages sell for thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars per seat. They have slick branding, slick marketing, big-time Fortune 500 clients they can point to. They are legitimately more capable and refined than Free Software alternatives, but by an ever-shrinking margin. We’re at the point where we can do FEM (material deformation under load) and CFM (fluid dynamics) and 3 axis milling in FreeCAD. It is perfectly suitable for a lot of general mechanical engineering applications at this point. Sure, your models will explode every now and then, but what the proprietary marketing materials don’t tell you is that the same thing will happen on their expensive shit if you are not very methodical about how you construct your models.
What they have going for them (much like Adobe) is that aspiring architects, engineers, and industrial designers go to college and learn THEIR software, and run into most of these problems before they hit the proper workforce. Then they might intern under the wings of experience engineers who have spent 20 years figuring out every single way a model will explode in their system. To everyone else, as long as the marketing materials say “state of the art” enough times, it is so.
No Free Software application has this kind of training infrastructure in place. I think in academic settings specifically, there is a major failure when it comes to software training. People learn “How to use Microsoft Word” instead of the bigger picture “How electronic documents are produced, processed, printed, and archived.” There’s a micro-focus on specific software functions and menus and hot-keys instead of taking a step back and investigating multiple ways things can be done, and which might be most appropriate in which situation. What happens when you decide to change the font size in your 300 page manuscript? Does it completely explode? Do you have to change the font independently on all 300 pages? Or did you properly define and use text styles throughout your document? Did you properly use page breaks instead of mashing the Enter key? These are the kind of problems people should be learning to solve, which apply in any word processing system, not how to specifically flip an embedded table in a Word document. It is the same with CAD software. It is micro-focused on specific CAD systems, instead of taking a more general overview of how components like file formats, CAD kernels, algebraic constraint solvers, coordinate and feature reference systems, etc. work. The engineers I work with are good enough at making models and blueprints within the ecosystem, but they keep trying to send me 3D models in IGES format and stuff like that when I need to process them in a third party CAM system. It is clear the CAD training they recieved is extremely application specific.
The capitalist ethos really is “Do nothing to fix anything until absolute disaster happens, and even then, give the absolute bare minimum bandaid solution”, huh?
Windows and Microsoft were short term solutions that cascaded into a decades-long mountain of sunken costs, technical debt, corporate inertia that manifests as vendor lock-in. converting everything from windows and microsoft infra. is a task that could take years for some companies, and only when the alternatives offer revolutionary benefits to their prospective clients.
Also proprietary software. If Microsoft never released visual basic, Windows never would have taken the workstation market from Unix.
There are probably tens of thousands of visual basic scripts still running in legacy infrastructure that’s now wrapped in Azure cloud infrastructure that would take decades to port to the moving target that is Weyland.
There’s also .NET and Visual Studio that lock dev teams into Microsoft.
I use ArcGIS Pro at work, and while their server system runs on Linux, their desktop application is .NET and only runs on Windows. Which means code written for the desktop app won’t work on the Linux server unless there’s a running instance of the Windows binary for it to hook into. So there’s a ton of companies that just have an intern log in occasionally and move the mouse around so the app wakes up and pulls the license key.
Then that interaction is translated through a JavaScript API that has bindings in Python and .NET so you can sync the Linux database server with the Windows desktop replicas and yadda yadda yadda. It’s all so insane now that any minor change will break someone’s workflow that was written to work based on bugs and shit.
That’s not even getting into Adobe and Autodesk…
i think about this a lot.
1.) tragically, the excel equivalents are not 1-to-1 when it comes to some spreadsheet calculations. like you could probably rebuild them, but they don’t always import cleanly. i am certain microsoft purposely kludges their file compatibility shit together so that open source standards don’t work correctly. they’ve been caught doing this with HTML & CSS, so i am sure they’re doing it purposely internally.
2.) i think microsoft’s enterprise & institutional sales kickback system is probably in the top 3, all time, everyday is the fucking superbowl, lock ‘em in and get the ink down. this is speculation on my end, but having seen their absolute sweetheart licensing system for large universities’ students & staff, the corporate and government sales side has got to be just as marquee, S-tier as that, if not more so. i have no doubt the kickbacks are brilliantly structured so as to be invisible to anyone except the decision making teams.
i think every government agency / organization / state government should have to publicly declare their software licensing fees every year. it is absolutely criminal how much public cash is being funneled to prolong this counter productive dependency and prop up this single repository of proprietary, shit-tier code.
When the revolution comes, all Microshit executives will be given one
directly proportional to every dollar from licensing agreements they received.
[why would a corporation use windows?]
I really think it is just the last one. I would argue that any features which are truly exclusive to Microsoft Office are so niche that they absolutely do not warrant holding back an organizational migration. The vast majority of people are perfectly happy using Google Docs for word processing and simple spreadsheets. For these tasks, any office suite is suitable. The handful of employees doing highly complex workflows in Microsoft Office can be issued machines suitable for the task (though I guarantee they are doing something stupid in Excel which should be done using a database system if anybody in the company gave a shit about investing in their IT infrastructure instead of just letting the accounts receivable clerk invent it whole-cloth in return for a standard performance review and 3% annual raise). Same thing goes for people developing iOS applications (for internal use or for clients and end-users), they get a Mac workstation to run XCode on, obviously. These accommodations can be made without the whole organization depending on using a specific platform. Technological necessity does not explain why they just run Windows and Office on everything they can.
As far as hardware compatibility goes, these PCs should be treated as part of the appliance. If you have something like an RFID badge printer which is only supported on Windows, it obviously gets Windows machine to use as a terminal. Any modestly sized company with an IT staff has a closet full of old laptops and micro-ATX towers perfectly suited for this purpose. There’s no need to reverse engineer the device. You can just stick an Intel NUC next to it and use it as intended, in compliance with the EULA and with the warranty intact. If you have an embedded system based on Windows (as various forms of industrial machinery do), obviously you leave that alone, because the vendor won’t service the machine otherwise. For most office workflows though, dedicated hardware should not be a concern. Again, these decisions aren’t being made out of technical necessity, but because everybody in the 90s was sold on the idea that if they didn’t learn how to write formulas in Excel they would end up operating a deep fryer for eternity - so now it is an abundant and replaceable skill.
Then again, all of that is rendered completely meaningless when your AI-coded OS can just simply self-destruct any given second. But yeah, I get what you’re saying.
Any software can self destruct at any second. The other nice thing about Microsoft is there is (ostensibly at least) a 24/7 large team of competent developers who can work to fix the problem. And failing that a large rich company to sue for damages…
Have you ever had Microsoft business support? Microsoft built my companies data center and left us with a network VM that was single threaded and had memory leaks that we rebooted every week. Over 4 years of working on the team Microsoft at no point ever fixed it and it resulted in the secondary data center getting a fraction of the bandwidth and dropping practically every other packet where we had to chunk and retry data transfers over and over just to get them to move across to the disaster recovery servers.
Microsoft is fucking atrocious for business users as well they’re no different from oracle or ibm who shovel shit for huge license costs then conveniently become unreachable when there’s an issue. Enough money to sue but in the belly of the beast the employee just gets the shit the organisation itself doesn’t care
I hereby send you to azure entra hell
I said “ostensibly at least” because I know it isn’t true in practice- just theory.
Too late I already loaded a copy of you brain into active directory
Damn. I tried to remember my childhood and it said cannot find memory, memory may be deleted or orphaned? What does that even mean?