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Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

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Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#81

Post by petervandijck »

ChRoss wrote: post #47
AlexMuir wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't get this insistance on control over utility servers. If we take sensitive businesses out of the equation there's really no argument for it. How many times has gmail been down for me? Never. What about exchange/lotus notes? At least once a month. And even when they work they're shit.

When you're using gmail, you also dependent on the internet connection. And my opinion, for business email, having abc@yourcompany.com looks better than abc@gmail.com

1. You can have gmail offline easily, using a variety of clients.

2. You can have x@yourdomain.com, no problem with gmail for business.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#82

Post by Terretta »

AlexMuir wrote: post #41
ankushnarula wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed.

Why is anyone up voting 'agreed'? If you agree, just vote for the comment surely?

Why is anyone voting up "good call"[1]? Agreed, good call: both sound like vote up.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668060

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#83

Post by byoung2 »

gmac wrote: post #76
trezor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Windows Mobile is in a sorry state, I'm not really too convinced by the rest of your list. IIS is believe it or not a very good webserver, fewer exploits than Apache and just as extensible. And you can extend it with .NET-code. No need for that icky C to do that. .NET is a very good development platform with lots of stuff happening. PHP? Really? Of all things horrible, you mentioned PHP? Microsoft at least had…

You're setting up a straw man if you argue that the least good item on the FOSS list is less good than the MS equivalent. You need to show that for the best item on the list. For example, my experience with MySQL is mixed, but PostgreSQL is a beautiful, beautiful thing. So here it seems to come down to the tooling you need (I can't comment on this: I've no SQL Server experience).

I would even argue that even if the FOSS alternative is inferior, it is more attractive than the MS option because of the price. Look at this: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx vs this: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#84

Post by gokhan »

rohitarondekar wrote: post #68
kenjackson wrote: post #36

Can Open Office and/or Google Apps access OLAP datastores as well as Excel can SSAS? Do either versions of their word processor have programmability layers so we can develop workflows directly in our office documents? Across all departments we have probably close to a million lines of VBA, COM, and VSTO code that we use most in Word and Excel. And a little for Outlook. And I just recently, like last week, seen some i…

"And the other tool that only MS has is Visual Studio. Still hands down the best dev environment I've used." http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

VS + Resharper might be a better alternative.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#85

Post by Keyframe »

_delirium wrote: post #4
carbocation wrote: post #2

For me, Office is the killer. You cannot seamlessly transfer things such as PPTX files from Office 2007 to OpenOffice. This is a critical problem, and is the thing keeping me on Windows. All of the scientists at my institution in my field use Microsoft software for presentations and for some amount of data exchange (the 'high-level', post-processing stuff--the actual data lives in flatfiles or databases). This, unfor…

That used to be the case for me, but around here the Office ecosystem has been increasingly fragmenting between versions--- some departments are all on Windows 7 with Office 2007, but quite a lot of machines are still on XP with Office 2003, and some folks (esp. on laptops) are using the Mac version of Office. The interoperability mess that causes is pushing people away from sending out Office file formats at all (mo…

You can save as PDF from MS Office too. Adobe pushed Microsoft not to include that feature in installations though, but it's free for download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d9...

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#87

Post by eccp »

dagw wrote: post #65
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #35

Primarily, I'd say it's application software support on Windows. Games? You get a few working under Wine, sometimes, partly, but they're far more likely to work well under the version of Windows they were tested with. Photo editing? Photoshop, or even Corel PhotoPaint, leave Linux in the dust. Video editing software? Nothing on Linux comes close to Vegas Video in features and usability. 3d Graphics? A slew of high-en…

I'm sorry, but saying that Blender is the only 3D app for Linux is simply incorrect. Maya, XSI and Houdini plus several other professional 3D apps all run on Linux.

"Linux infrastructure was heavily used in Avatar's graphics rendering done by Weta Digital [...] The Data Center of Weta Digital was re-built in 2008 and consists of 34 racks and more than 4,000 Hewlett-Packard blade servers with a 104TB of RAM. Ubuntu is at the core of all of this, running on all of the rendering nodes, and 90% of the desktops at Weta Digital, according to Paul Gunn, the data center's systems administrator."

http://jordanopensource.org/freeplanet/article/ubuntu-linux-...

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#88

Post by bruceboughton »

SecurityMatters wrote: post #67
kenjackson wrote: post #36

Can Open Office and/or Google Apps access OLAP datastores as well as Excel can SSAS? Do either versions of their word processor have programmability layers so we can develop workflows directly in our office documents? Across all departments we have probably close to a million lines of VBA, COM, and VSTO code that we use most in Word and Excel. And a little for Outlook. And I just recently, like last week, seen some i…

I don't know about accessing OLAP databases, but it seems like a bad idea, anyway. The programmability of OpenOffice is quite powerful and workflows can and are automated with it. Visual Studio is not bad for people with little understanding of development. Unfortunately, CS schools turn out many people like that these days. I don't know why people want tools that get in the way and slow you down as much as Visual St…

> Visual Studio is not bad for people with little understanding of development.

You do know that Visual Studio is not just a drag-and-drop visual designer tool right? This is the most insulting gibberish I've read all day.

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#89

Post by smiler »

petervandijck wrote: post #80
duck wrote: post #15

Exchange - gmail I see this comparison so often, but it really is apples and oranges. I love gmail and use it daily, but it isn't a replacement for Exchange. First, gmail is just a client... you have no control over the server aspect with Google. That is fine for a lot of small businesses, but for most mid to large companies that isn't an option. Does Exchange cost a lot of money? Yes, but with that you get a first c…

Experience with typical large company email: regularly unavailable. Silly limits on attachment size. Limited control. Crap UI. Down regularly. Takes days to get a new email set up. Takes day to troubleshoot problems (ie. emails that become unavailable). Costs heaps, need dedicated "IT Support staff" (don't get me started on that). Experience with Gmail: pay 20$ for heaps of storage. Very large attachments no problem.…

Has some annoyances though - for example you can't send a batch file in an attachment. It's obviously a good idea for security reasons, but when you're a bunch of developers, it's kinda useful!

Re: Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

#90

Post by smiler »

mediajunkie wrote: post #50
duck wrote: post #15

Exchange - gmail I see this comparison so often, but it really is apples and oranges. I love gmail and use it daily, but it isn't a replacement for Exchange. First, gmail is just a client... you have no control over the server aspect with Google. That is fine for a lot of small businesses, but for most mid to large companies that isn't an option. Does Exchange cost a lot of money? Yes, but with that you get a first c…

The business (premium) version of Gmail on Google Apps provides an Exchange connector for Outlook and sync for mail, calendar and contacts, and is a direct competitor to Exchange Server itself. Even Standard edition for small businesses is a real alternative to running an in-house exchange server, even if they still use an Outlook client. So it's fair to say with Google Apps that Gmail is both a web-client and server…

Except the connector for Outlook is an absolute load of crap, hogs bandwidth, regular hangs up and doesn't receive e-mail or won't send an e-mail and you have to restart Outlook. It's getting there but it's not there yet
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