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Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

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Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#41

Post by cargo8 »

Great call out on a reasonable strategy for Microsoft to remain successful, albeit less relevant in the consumer market. (There is another comment alluding to taking the route of IBM, cementing their place in enterprise but sacrificing the consumer market a bit). AD is definitely a great asset that is probably not thought of as much as it should be given its usage, as you point out.

I would say, though, that claiming that IE and Bing advertising is "wasted" is pretty bold. Sure, OSD hasn't started turning a profit yet, but there is something to be said about Bing having ~30% market share and the fact that if Bing did not exist, Google would almost certainly have a complete monopoly on search today. The data generated from Bing and the Bing ecosystem is incredibly valuable, but Bing Ads have yet to unlock the full revenue potential unfortunately. Consider, though, that Google and Microsoft are the only two companies that have the unbelievably valuable asset that is an index of the entire (within reason) web.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#42

Post by jiggy2011 »

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?

In abstract, centralise everything. You have a "Domain Controller" which is basically a server which everything authenticates against.

Settings from domain controllers (privileges etc) are propagated over the network to other servers (Email,File servers etc).

So when you authenticate against a DC (by logging into your workstation etc) you get a token back which can be sent to other hosts on the network who then understand what to grant access to based on that token.

This makes it easier for a large org with an international presence to allow say marketing teams in the London and New York offices to have access to the same files etc and be able to use each others workstations interchangeably whilst all being managed by the IT team in Mumbai.

This means that if you stick to mainly MS products you get the advantage of knowing that everything will integrate into AD so you spend less time handrolling shared authentication etc.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#43

Post by raverbashing »

jewel wrote: post #7

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…

The problem is that the initial hurdle of configuring it, when considering the time spent, is expensive in face of AD licensing.

LDAP goes out of the way to be complicated. Ad is nicely packaged, clicky, clicky, and "anyone" can manage it.

That's where MS makes its money. People are expensive.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#45

Post by Spearchucker »

rizzom5000 wrote: post #10

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…

Office too, has a strong dependency on AD. AD is how Office documents are protected (rights management), how they're synced to Office 365 (WS-Federation -> AD), and how they allow multi-person, simultaneous/real-time editing. Amongst other stuff.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#46

Post by Spearchucker »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #42
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?

In abstract, centralise everything. You have a "Domain Controller" which is basically a server which everything authenticates against. Settings from domain controllers (privileges etc) are propagated over the network to other servers (Email,File servers etc). So when you authenticate against a DC (by logging into your workstation etc) you get a token back which can be sent to other hosts on the network who then under…

Nitpick - AD supports a centralised topology, but is more effective when decentralised. You can deploy as many domain controllers as you like, you can separate global catalogues entirely, and deploy multiples of those, and you can even separate domains within forests, and then create cross-domain trusts. If you want to create cross-forest trusts you can do that using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS).

ADFS is hugely under-rated, and is arguably the most capable identity federation software out there because it's the only implementation I know of that does both passive- (browser-based), and active federation, which allows you to authenticate against AD from your JSON service.

That story gets even better with U-Prove (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/twc/endtoendtrust/vision/upr...).

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#47

Post by hmexx »

cargo8 wrote: post #41

Great call out on a reasonable strategy for Microsoft to remain successful, albeit less relevant in the consumer market. (There is another comment alluding to taking the route of IBM, cementing their place in enterprise but sacrificing the consumer market a bit). AD is definitely a great asset that is probably not thought of as much as it should be given its usage, as you point out. I would say, though, that claiming…

Yeah. People seem to forget that MS has a larger share of the search market than Apple does of the PC market. And search has given the market leader (Google) a 200bn+ market cap!

So not exactly throwing money down the drain.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#49

Post by pfortuny »

hapuka wrote: post #38
sjtrny wrote: post #19

I stopped reading at "I could care less".

Yes, me too. This is so irritating. The proper usage surely must be "I couldn't care less." "I could care less." - There is room for you to care less than you care now. This phrase is meaningless as a way to describe how much you care about something.

Well, as a matter of fact, I would understand 'I could care less' when someone has been taken with something too much and realizes it. Obviously, it seems the OP's meaning was not this...

Yes, its irritating, like not using the apostrophe correctly :-)

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