Re: Bill Gates, thank God.
But when they finally get some good leadership (Satya), no one notices or cares.
I am a charter member of the "Microsoft Sucks Worse Than the Vacuum of Space" choir. That said, I think the recent moves by Satya are good. I also feel like they are mostly inevitable. In the enterprise, the only compelling offering is Exchange, primarily because of mountains of inertia and a general dearth of knowledge about alternatives. Microsoft is in some serious trouble because MS-Windows scales for shit.
Of course, the fact that Satya is better than Ballmer is a pretty low bar. He definitely seems to be able to consider alternatives that Ballmer was incapable of. This is good. On the other hand, the ham-handed Windows 10 forced upgrade regime was completely on Satya's watch.
I'm cautiously optimistic that having greater support for Linux is a good thing, as long as Microsoft can keep from executing their standard EEE approach, which would be difficult to execute in this case anyway.
One thing I've found to be really funny to watch over the past few years is seeing die-hard MS-Windows partisans extolling the virtues of Powershell, after making disparaging comments about command line tools like Bash for literally decades. I still shudder every time I have to deal with Microsoft software in any meaningful way, because it is always so clunky to me. The lack of virtual desktops in their default GUI shell still amazes me.
Spits (coffee...)
Dude, seriously? Their on-premises burden of a messaging server???
That's the first thing I gave up when Cloud Services started. Went Exchange Online and never looked back.
Without Internet connectivity, messaging servers are, well, useless?
So why run it locally? Get it all from the Web.
I say this as a MCSE, Messaging, since Windows NT. I have certified on Exchange 5.0 all the way to 2013. We had 25K+ accounts. I gave it all up for Exchange Online. AND, I no longer get calls at O'Dark 30 to come in and fix email.
And before I go, I love Windows Server 2016. I even use it as my desktop.