Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#1

Post by jbpadgett » Thu, Nov 22, 2012, 4:02 AM UTC

Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset
padgeblog.com

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#2

Post by meshko » Thu, Nov 22, 2012, 4:41 AM UTC

Very true.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#3

Post by medell » Thu, Nov 22, 2012, 4:58 AM UTC

I worked for a company with 25,000 office employees worldwide and can say that they won't be leaving Microsoft anytime soon for this reason.

They were using IE6 all the way up until 2010, finishing the deploy of IE8 two years after it was released. :/

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#4

Post by freehunter » Thu, Nov 22, 2012, 5:02 AM UTC

So, what I'm taking from this is that the author feels Microsoft should pull an IBM and basically completely withdraw from the consumer market. While it's true that Microsoft's best domain is in the enterprise market, I have to imagine there's more to it than them "wasting money" on IE, Bing, etc. AD is great, but even in the server space Microsoft has a lot more to offer than just one product.

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).

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#5

Post by pixie_ » Thu, Nov 22, 2012, 5:04 AM UTC

I'm not familiar with big orgs. What does active directory facilitate mostly? Like seeing a list of other computers in the company and accessing their drives?

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#6

Post by damian2000 » Thu, Nov 22, 2012, 5:07 AM UTC

pixie_ wrote: post #5

I'm not familiar with big orgs. What does active directory facilitate mostly? Like seeing a list of other computers in the company and accessing their drives?

Single sign on, group policies, user account control on a global scale.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#7

Post by jewel » Thu, Nov 22, 2012, 5:23 AM UTC

In 2006 I helped put in an OpenLDAP server in a medium-sized company (150 users). Once we'd gotten past the initial hump of configuring everything to work with it, it was really nice to have single sign-on and a list of users and permissions accessible from any computer on the network.

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.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#8

Post by troymc » Thu, Nov 22, 2012, 5:44 AM UTC

Corporate directories aren't something I'm familiar with, so forgive me if this question seems naive:

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?

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#9

Post by est » Thu, Nov 22, 2012, 5:45 AM UTC

It's now on an interesting fork right now. ActiveDirectly is possible via DCOM and MMCs, but Microsoft is thinking of replacing it with .NET Remoting and Web based UIs.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#10

Post by rizzom5000 » Thu, Nov 22, 2012, 5:55 AM UTC

While I've certainly seen firsthand the importance of AD in enterprise, and I agree that it will continue to sell a lot of Server and SharePoint licenses for MS - I think Office is probably a stronger most valuable asset for a variety of reasons. Among them, Office actually is MSFT's most profitable product and it actually currently doesn't face any noteworthy competition (not that AD does, mind you).

Also, I had to check to see if 'blogosphere' was coined prior to 2001, and found that indeed it was.