Microsoft announces 16 years of support for Windows, SQL Servers Microsoft's announced a new “Premium Assurance” plan for Windows Server and SQL Server. Redmond currently offers five years of Mainstream Support on the aforementioned products, during which new features are added and updates are made for reasons of security or just to fix things up. Next comes five years of extended support, …
Have you seen Server 2012? It's already had the Windows 10 treatment on the user interface, only a matter of time before it starts showing ads, uninstalling important tools and auto-installing bloatware.
Server 2012 had the Window 8 (not Window 8.1) interface foisted upon it. Windows 2016 is better on this front because the Windos 10 UI is somewhat less shit than the Windows 8 interface.
Then there's the Server Core installation of Windows Server 2016, entertainingly easy to confuse with the per-core licensing naming, which is a sort of no-GUI interface (if you've used it you'll understand) which would be OK if MS's tools and products were actually complete, or ideally just consistent, when it came to running in a GUI-free environment. Compared to adminstering Linux systems, managing Server Core system is rather more painful but "entertaining" fun when you involve 3rd parties who can only work with a mouse... :)
Why all this bitching about the UI? Don't you know real SysAdmins never use a GUI!
:)
Real SysAdmins also don't have a backspace key on their keyboard :) They also don't using windowing systems at all, everything is done in a single full screen VT-100 compatible terminal window. Preferably green screen, although orange is acceptable at a push. But no other colours.
Personally, I find the "you must do everything in a GUI" and "you must do everything in a command line" camps annoyingly stupid. I'll use whatever is most appropriate thank you: If it's something that I don't have to administer very often then a GUI is just fine but if it's something that I have to administer often then scripting is the way forward, particularly if I want to perform repeated or consistent processes and especially so when this spans multiple systems.
In some ways this would imply that a GUI should not have it's own interface into a system and should instead call a command line behind the scenes to perform it's actions, this way the same functionality is available wherever you want it. If the GUI also lists the commands that it is performing then this makes learning what the hell it does (with the aim to automating the process elsewhere) rather easier. While this can work well, sometimes this means that a GUI is rather inefficient or the command line interfaces are sub-optimal as they're designed primarily to support a GUI.
Looks to me as though this might signal the slowing or end of active development for on premises stuff. Server 2016 was already morphing into a cloud first system, and pretty much every innovation had that in mind. It would be a great way to make some more cash without being obliged to keep adding features. Let's face it, nobody is really demanding more features on premises and ver few people want to upgrade systems so allowing for two paths forward (on prem, little change, cloud lots of change) is a good idea. Well, it's not an entirely stupid idea...
>If you need to ask, then you need to read the article
No the real final cash cost, those may be the costs in %$ term per 2 core licence per annum list now but what will the real cost be in sterling over the lifetime on multi core and are there any caveats in the small print to allow them to put the the price up ? The Devil is in the detail, be vary careful when dealing with Microsoft or it could cost you.
Translation
We realise that our primary revenue streams are drying up as our customers don't like most of the recent offerings that we've been trying to force feed them and large swathes of them are refusing the rations.
Secondly, companies that use our products take absolutely ages to decide to roll out, citing terms such as "Business plans", "testing", "ROI" and "user re-training", "support re-training", but we don't know (or care) what these things mean as long as you pay up.
So, rather than providing the things that customers want, we're going to try and sting them again with what we should have offered them in the first place - long term stable products at a good price point..
I wonder if they will ever realise that the "bleed the customer to death" and "constantly changing products" are key reasons why people don't upgrade.
"Microsoft's cloud efforts are growing faster than Amazon"
% growth is not a good measure here. Azure is doing well, for sure, but from everything I see AWS is doing better. Adding 50% to $Millions is not as good as adding 5% to $Billions. Regardless of progress, it now seems clear (with a little research) that AWS and Azure will be the top cloudy dogs. Oracle, Google and IBM will do nicely too I imagine within each of their niches.
Sorry for the anon - work at a partner of several of the above :)
"% growth is not a good measure here"
OK then, see http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-industry-insights/cloud-computing-trends-2016-state-cloud-survey
AWS is flat from last year. Doing better for now due to a head start in terms of raw numbers, but rapidly loosing the war to Azure...
Those not smoking Microsoft Pot are able to see through the smoke screen that the marketing department is putting out.
Windows 10 market share barely has a pulse, so that's real usage of machines that report their OS version to strangers.
The only reason it had a large install base is because of the Malware and forced updates, but the huge Win 7 install base and paltry 37% user base for Win 10 shows that it didn't work. BTW - did you actually talk to any Windows 10 users to see if they like the OS ?? Most I've spoken to absolutely hate it for a variety of reasons (lost data, broken hardware, things disheartening, the spyware, etc).
Next up, cloud
AWS has 10 times the capacity of the next 14 players combined.
AWS leads Gartner magic quadrant for the 6th straight year
So, again you are wrong. All the above is real information, not a marketing department's WhatsThePoint presentation.
So, its definitely not all going Microsoft's way. The swathes that are refusing the dog food are those who are not migrating and likely the reason behind this announcement.
There's also the other little issue that you seem to be confusing "Cloud" as a thing that makes the IT problems all go away. There is still corporate change control and upgrade cycles, user training, integration testing, etc that need to be done.
Cloud isn't a magic bullet that "fixes" all the IT problems that exist.This is one of the reasons why there is a plethora of XaaS offerings such as IaaS and PaaS as one size doesn't fit all.
"AWS has 10 times the capacity of the next 14 players combined."
That Gartner assessment was from nearly 2 years ago. The article makes clear that Microsoft are catching them up as #2 - for now. "shows this to be a two-horse race with market pioneer Amazon running first, while Microsoft continues a strong push at second." So a fail for Google, not Microsoft...
"AWS leads Gartner magic quadrant for the 6th straight year"
With Microsoft catching up in second - again way ahead of Google...
> The only reason it had a large install base is because of the Malware and forced updates,
The vast major part of the growth of Windows 10 is that 200+ million new PCs and laptops are sold each year and the majority of them are forced to have Windows 10 installed. In fact the growth in W10 over the last few months appears to be less than the number of PCs sold which implies that many are being upgraded to something else.
Windows 10 only exceeded the Windows 7 adoption rate by a small margin in the first year. Windows 7 reached 19% in a year (source unknown); Windows 10 managed 21% (netmarketshare.com):
Without being offered for free for home/small office users for the entirety of that first year.
Without being an automatic Windows update that would self-install if you had updates on auto.
Without GWX adware nagging people to get it after assuring them it was a good idea and fully reversible (without letting them know that there was risk that it would fail and render the PC unbootable).
Without the above GWX installing it even if you didn't want it.
If Windows 10 had been marketed the same way as other versions, it wouldn't be anywhere close to the fastest adoption rate. A more apt comparison would be the adoption rate in the second year... anyone want to take bets on the fastest adoption rate during the second year?
> Microsoft's cloud efforts are growing faster than Amazon
We have seen the results of your fanatical growth predictions before. These seem to have been yours under the guise of AC*.
"""Windows Phone sales are growing rapidly so that seems unlikely. 156% year on year growth"""
"""Windows Phone and RT are growing market share rapidly. Windows RT might not be a confirmed success yet, but it's certainly not dead. Windows Phone however is going from strength to strength and will clearly take second place in mobile OS market share by the end of next year if growth continues at the same rate it has for the last year...."""
"""Windows Phone is already ahead of IOS in 25 countries"""
* which, of course, is why you try to remember to hit the AC button and changed from RICHTO, Your complete failures mean that no one takes any notice of your messages.
Just got a new gaming desktop delivered from Chillblast today for my son's Xmas present so had to start it up and check it worked.
Set no to everything in the advanced options then installed Spybot Anti-beacon to block the telemetrics.
Quite sad it's the first thing you think about when buying a PC with Windows 10 on it.
I count six ethnic types and only the one whiteboy in that picture, a bit overkill on the diversity don't you think.
I count six ethnic types and only the one whiteboy in that picture, a bit overkill on the diversity don't you think.
It's America. Despite various other things, it's no wonder that the majority of Americans, who happen to be mostly "white", are pissed off when every Hollywood and marketing message apparently has to have a majority of minorities in it: because the minorities may be offended if it were otherwise. You kind of start to understand why so many voted for a different lizard this time.
Interesting to see the list of eligible products:
• Windows Server 2008/R2 Standard, Datacenter, and Enterprise
• Windows Server 2012/R2 Standard and Datacenter
• Windows Server 2016 Standard and Datacenter
• SQL Server 2008/R2 Standard, Datacenter, and Enterprise
• SQL Server 2012 Standard and Enterprise
• SQL Server 2014 Standard and Enterprise
• SQL Server 2016 Standard and Enterprise
And note the omissions:
- Small Business Server 2008/2011
- All MS enterprise applications other than SQL-Server.
Perhaps behind this is recognition that DB servers are long life beasts and hence don't need to be updated every couple of years and hence this can be turned into a revenue earning stream.
Given how hard Microsoft is pushing Azure-first stuff, this might be one last olive branch to their "legacy" customers. Server 2016 is a traditional Windows release, but everything is slowly being sent over to microservices and PaaS-land. My experience so far with Azure is that Microsoft is doing everything they can to get companies to migrate their applications, not just to Azure IaaS, but to rewrite them to use PaaS components. There's a lot of positives for this, but one issue is the fact that you're now paying forever to use the service rather than paying once for a packaged license.
The big things that are going to keep customers on "classic" Windows are things like domain-joined SQL Server, remote app publishing (Citrix/RDS) and Active Directory (not Azure AD.) There's just too much built up around these items and no easy cloudy way to completely replace them. Everything else (ASP.NET applications, file/print sharing, etc.) can easily be handled by an App Service or cloud file storage. Assuming enterprises aren't going to outsource their identity management to Facebook or Google, their choices are going to be Azure AD or Classic AD for quite some time, and Azure AD doesn't do policy-based user/machine management to the same level Classic AD does.
In a way, this makes sense. Microsoft gets a constant revenue stream for cranking out updates, and customers who don't want Azure and don't want to move their applications get a slower pace of change. It's dizzying how much changes in Azure over a month...whole new services roll out almost weekly and the existing ones get upgraded capabilities.
Before:
sysadmin: "We need to start planning for replacing these Windows 2008 servers soon, so we're off them before extended support runs out"
boss: "Damn, didn't we just migrate off Windows 2003 last year? I guess we have no choice though if we're going to get security patches"
Today:
sysadmin: "We need to start planning for replacing these Windows 2008 servers soon, so we're off them before extended support runs out"
boss: "We can hold off a little longer, if we don't finish them all in time there's always premium support available"
Five years from now:
boss: "Why the hell is our Microsoft support bill so high?"
sysadmin: "Because you kept delaying our Windows 2008 migration, and now we're paying Microsoft so much you keep saying we can't afford the migration in this year's budget"
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