| Kickbacks are most likely not the case. Why would a billions of dollars a year in profit company need to pay people to adopt tech? It is highly unethical and probably a fire-able offense for a sales person at a US company to bribe (aka kickback) potential customers to buy their stuff. Think about that for a minute. Just like you and your peers have a culture of liking Open Source, macs, etc. he/she likely has a strong bias (culture?) towards Microsoft solution stack. See if you can get some time on the persons calendar and ask open ended questions about the shift in technology. Rewriting an entire product or changing an IT stack from one tech to another is costly, even more so if 50% of the staff turn-over. * Does management see this as cheaper? * Do they value having a vendor they can call and an SLA support contract? Lots of large companies like this - "you can't be wrong in picking IBM" is a joke phrase for a reason. * Is there some vision they have where they were convinced some tech will enable it? I've seen this too, they get convinced of some new way of doing things by consultants for a company, which comes along with using that companies tech stack. But mgmt doesn't care about the tech stack they care about how it can help the business. * Does this person view Open Source tech like Node, Go, PHP as "amateur hour"? They could have a strong bias of using stuff from name brand companies. It probably boils down to the IT Director having a different world-view than you and other devs. |
A lot of comments here echo this sentiment and yeah, it's not Microsoft, but there are plenty of shady Gold Partners and Solutions Providers out there, as well as shady execs purchasing tech for companies.
I saw a company once hire a VP of IT who came in, fired most all the java devs (it was a java shop) and mandated .net. That was a dumpster fire, spectacular failure, company went under. The company was in trouble anyway, and .net transition was part of a bid to turn it all around. I always suspected that guy got kickbacks for the ms server and sql server licenses, but never knew for sure.