"In fact, so many people I work with don’t use Windows as their host OS."<p>Then the people you work with are a edge case minority.<p>Windows absolutely and completely dominates the desktop computer landscape in both enterprise and home. Most estimates have it at 90-95% penetration worldwide vs mac/nix.<p>For anyone who may say macs are now selling more than ever before and that MS is losing market share fast, remember that apple is not even in the top 5 for computer manufacturers. For every Mac computer sold, there is 90+ Windows equipped computers.<p>While MS may be in trouble in the phone/tablet market, they still are on extremely solid footing in the desktop market. The question just becomes, what will become a desktop computer in 5 years. Will we all abandon what it is currently and move to tablets?
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.<p>Since we could access the directory from perl it was easy to make a simple UI for the support team to make changes.<p>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.
In the corporate space I'd agree, but the Xbox brand isn't to be discounted. The Halo series is a money printing machine.<p>"All in all, the Halo franchise has made nearly $3 billion from sales."<p>"Halo: Reach, Halo creator Bungie's last Halo game, made more than $200 million in sales in the US and Europe in the first 24 hours of release. This figure eclipsed all previous 2010 US entertainment launches, including the three-day opening weekends of Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland and Toy Story 3."<p><a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-10-31-more-than-46-million-halo-games-have-been-sold-worldwide" rel="nofollow">http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-10-31-more-than-46-mi...</a><p><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/12/us-microsoft-halo-idUSBRE8AB19120121112" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/12/us-microsoft-halo-...</a>
My dayjob is as a business process consultant, specialising in the Atlassian application stack among other things.<p>Almost every single hour of my time working with an enterprise customer involves dealing with AD or related Microsoft products in some fashion.<p>In the enterprise, I almost always deploy to windows products, over the preferred linux+postgres+apache stack, because the business has already invested in resources to manage Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and IIS, in conjunction with AD. Configuration tends to be more platform agnostic, as the applications are Java based, however the number of gotchas that seem to crop up around the Microsoft products make it a big enough pain.<p>It's unfortunate that the link to AD so often blossoms out to the entire infrastructure stack, as the products are in many ways inferior to their open source relatives, but the momentum, support and resources are already there and it doesn't look like changing anytime soon.
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).<p>Also, I had to check to see if 'blogosphere' was coined prior to 2001, and found that indeed it was.
This guy is spot on. I've done quite a bit of time in the corporate environment running middleware systems such as LDAP and AD.<p>Google Apps does not have a viable solution because it is not in house. There is no easy way to extend the schema and integrating with Google Apps is actually quite difficult. There are tools to help you integrate from Active Directory to Google Apps but not the other way around.<p>Also Active Directory is actually pretty awesome from a management standpoint. Suppose today you wanted to have 50k linux boxes with all the same logins. You would probably use LDAP (which is essentially AD under the hood). But how about automatic package management per user? How do you configure that? AD has all this built in and more.
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.<p>They were using IE6 all the way up until 2010, finishing the deploy of IE8 two years after it was released. :/
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.<p>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 <i>huge</i> success in the desktop market (a market that isn't quite as dead as some seem to call it).
This is probably only of historical interest but: in 2001 I started building a Linux-based Active Directory replacement, XAD. I first demonstrated it in 2003 and I think we shipped around 2005. The underlying technology was OpenLDAP and Heimdal, but obviously with a lot of homegrown code (many RPCs, support for multimaster replication, etc).<p>XAD was sold to Novell in 2007 and was rebranded Domain Services for Windows. I haven't really followed its progress since; of course, Samba4 is also now an effective Active Directory replacement.
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.<p>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.
Not really a well written piece. In fact, it's pretty poorly written.<p>But yes, AD is king in most enterprises. Definitely one of Microsoft's most important assets.<p>And that can be said with way less text. Like I just did.
Please someone create a cool, cheaper alternative to AD that runs on Linux and does not suck!<p>Insert below mandatory answer about how great existing open-source solutions are.
Corporate directories aren't something I'm familiar with, so forgive me if this question seems naive:<p>Does Google Apps for Business (i.e. <a href="http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/</a> ) have a viable solution for the corporate directory, or do they just expect you to use a third-party solution like Microsoft Active Directory?
At the risk of intentionally misunderstanding the OP's definition of the word 'asset', aren't their developers supposed to be their most valuable asset? I'm not saying they are, just that if they aren't (anymore), I'd worry about that instead.
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.
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?