After two major outages in as many weeks — including the CrowdStrike crash — alarm bells are ringing about the world's overreliance on Microsoft. Andrew Chan...
“We”, no. “Too many”, yes.
In general, hard dependencies on proprietary software or services are often overlooked or ignored as potential future problems. Recent examples of this are Microsoft and VMware. Once the vendor changes things so that you don’t like anymore, or drives up prices like crazy, you’ll quickly realize that you have a problem you can’t solve other than switching, which you might not even be prepared to do short-term.
The Windows world now experiences this because Microsoft is no longer interested in maintaining a somewhat quality operating system, they are mostly interested in milking their user base for data, and don’t hesitate to annoy or even disrupt their user base’s workflows in a try to achieve that goal.
Many Windows users are currently looking at Linux because of this, but the more your whole workflow is based on dependencies to proprietary Windows-only software, the harder your time to switch will be.
If you still use Windows today, you should at least start using more open source or cross platform software, which also will work on Linux, because you are on a sinking ship and there will probably be a time when you can’t take MS’ BS anymore and want to switch. Make it easier for you in the future by regarding Linux compatibility in the hard- and software you use today.
“We”, no. “Too many”, yes. In general, hard dependencies on proprietary software or services are often overlooked or ignored as potential future problems. Recent examples of this are Microsoft and VMware. Once the vendor changes things so that you don’t like anymore, or drives up prices like crazy, you’ll quickly realize that you have a problem you can’t solve other than switching, which you might not even be prepared to do short-term.
The Windows world now experiences this because Microsoft is no longer interested in maintaining a somewhat quality operating system, they are mostly interested in milking their user base for data, and don’t hesitate to annoy or even disrupt their user base’s workflows in a try to achieve that goal.
Many Windows users are currently looking at Linux because of this, but the more your whole workflow is based on dependencies to proprietary Windows-only software, the harder your time to switch will be. If you still use Windows today, you should at least start using more open source or cross platform software, which also will work on Linux, because you are on a sinking ship and there will probably be a time when you can’t take MS’ BS anymore and want to switch. Make it easier for you in the future by regarding Linux compatibility in the hard- and software you use today.