[oytis]

> Companies that are not software-focused, as it's not their primary business. These organizations are left with Microsoft's offerings

I wonder why is it the case. These companies still have IT departments, someone has to manage these huge fleets of Windows machines. So nothing would prevent them from hiring Linux admins instead of Windows admins. What makes the management of these companies consider Windows to be the default choice?

[hnlmorg]

It's because of two things:

1. Users are more comfortable running Windows and Office because it's Windows they likely used in school and on personal laptops.

2. This is the biggie: Microsoft's enterprise services for managing fleets of workstations are actually really good -- or at least a massive step up from the competition. Linux (and it's ilk) is much better for managing fleets of servers, but workstations require a whole different type of tooling. And once you have AD and it's ilk running and thus Windows administrators hired, it's often easier to run other services from Windows too, rather than having to spin up another cluster of management services.

Software focused businesses generally start out with engineers running macOS or Linux, so they wouldn't have Windows management services pre-provisioned. And that's why you generally see them utilising stuff like Okta or Google Workspace

[dakratec]

Unfortunately Google did not succeed to get more into schools around the globe with chromebooks, which is a pity by my opinion. That helps to keep the Win/Office monopoly situation to go on in organizations and businesses hiring people who never used another software than one from Microsoft.

[fernandopj]

One reason being that Microsoft lobby hard against low-end PC & notebooks that are not aligned with its interests. [1]

Microsoft has a large, entrenched distribution network and market all over the world. It makes an uphill battle to create low-end programs for schools, universities, governments, SMBs.

Hence the phrase "no one was ever fired from buying Microsoft". It's too hard a battle to go against the flow.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsofts-dra...

[TeMPOraL]

Inertia, plus integration - AFAIK Exchange and SharePoint don't run on Linux, so if the company buys into that, then it's Windows all the way down.

Still, all this is a red herring. Using Linux instead of Windows on workstations won't change anything, because it's not the OS that's the problem. A typical IT department is locked in a war on three fronts - defending against security threats, pushing back on unreasonable demands from the top, and fighting the company employees who want to do their jobs. Linux may or may not help against external attackers, but the fight against employees (which IT does both to fulfill mandates from the top and to minimize their own workload) requires tools for totalitarian control over computing devices.

Windows actually is better suited for that, because it's designed to constrain and control users. Linux is designed for the smart user to be able to do whatever they want, which includes working around stupid IT policies and corporate malware. So it shouldn't be surprising corporate IT favors Windows workstations too - it puts IT at an advantage over the users, and minimizes IT workload.

[wing-_-nuts]

>Windows actually is better suited for that, because it's designed to constrain and control users. Linux is designed for the smart user to be able to do whatever they want, which includes working around stupid IT policies and corporate malware.

This just tells me you don't know linux. Linux can be much more easily hardened and restricted than windows. It's trivial to make it so that a user can only install whitelisted software from private repos.

[layer8]

> It's trivial to make it so that a user can only install whitelisted software from private repos.

This is also straightforward on Windows with AD-managed Group Policies.

[conception]

Excel. There is no other software that can currently fill excel’s role in business. It’s the best at what it does and what it does is usually very important. Unfortunately.

[TeMPOraL]

Excel is the driver for small businesses and individual departments. SharePoint is what keeps large businesses committed to Windows.

[danaris]

Excel runs just fine on Macs, though, so that only explains "why not Linux?", not "why Windows?"

[xnx]

The situation might have changed since I last used Excel on Mac, but in 2018, the "Excel" on Mac barely resembled the Excel on Windows. Many obvious and useful features were missing.

[sfifs]

No longer. Everything is there. Just switched work machines to Mac from Win

[layer8]

Not everything is there. There are still important limitations: https://spreadsheeto.com/mac-vs-windows/

[Digit-Al]

My guess is that the fact you can buy about two to three cheap Dell desktop machines for the price of one Mac probably factors quite heavily into the equation.

[johnbellone]

It definitely does not run “just fine”. It’s passable at best.

[tomrod]

Gnumeric, Libreoffice, Google Sheets, Zoho...

There are plenty of sufficient replacements for Excel if organizations are willing to work with other tools

[beisner]

If you’re only doing vacation travel planning, sure. But there’s a long tail of advanced functionality used across all kinds of industries (with plugins upon plugins) that are most certainly not even close to being supported by any of the options proposed.

[gvurrdon]

I don't know, but I would guess that Microsoft Office is what retains people; personal anectodal experience suggests that anything else (Apple's offerings, Google Docs, LibreOffice &c.) is not acceptable to the average user. My suspicion is that Microsoft would be very unhappy to have MS Office running successfully on Linux systems.

[afavour]

> These companies still have IT departments

A lot actually don’t, in any meaningful sense. My partner’s company has a skeleton IT staff with all support requests being sent offshore. An issue with your laptop? A new one gets dispatched from ??? and mailed to you, you mail the old one back, presumably to get wiped and redispatched to the new person that has a problem.

[chucke1992]

Tooling, infra, knowledge? The only reason why people are talking about "issues in Windows" because people are widely using it.

If linux had software anywhere close to the amount that windows has, it would have experienced the same issues too. After all it is not just about running a server and tinkering with config files. It is about ability to manage the devices, rolling out updates and so on.

[amlib]

You have to also factor in competition. I think it's a big factor on why corporate IT is generally bad, Microsoft and their partners have no reason to improve on the status quo. If we had viable alternatives, in a market where no entity has more than 20% market share or something like that the standards would be much higher.

[chucke1992]

Standards of what? Microsoft cannot force the third party company to test their own builds before releasing them.

[oytis]

The whole idea of running a backdoor with OS privileges in order to increase system security screams Windows. In Linux, even if Crowdstrike (or similar endpoint management software) is allowed to update itself, it doesn't have to run as a kernel driver. So a buggy update to Crowdstrike would only kill Crowdstrike and nothing else.

And Linux is not even a particularly hardened OS. If we could take some resources from VC smoke and mirrors and dedicate them to securing our critical infrastructure we could have airports and hospitals running on some safety-critical microkernel OS with tailored software.

[dariosalvi78]

Office. The entire world runs on Excel, Word and Powerpoint. Unfortunately.

[briandear]

Word and PowerPoint are disposable. Pages and Keynote work just fine. Excel on the Mac is perfectly fine.

But that aside — Excel is a single application. That one app doesn’t determine an entire Corporate IT strategy.

[tomrod]

> That one app doesn’t determine an entire Corporate IT strategy

It actually does in some industries, but it is dumb that it does.

[7thaccount]

You can get that on Mac right?

[dariosalvi78]

the comment I am replying to explicitly mentions Linux as an alternative to Windows. In any case, yes, one could use Mac, as I do, but it comes with its own issues, starting from price. I'd happily switch 100% to Linux if I didn't need to work on documents edited with Office. The online version may actually solve this, but it's still buggy as hell.

[gadders]

Word, Excel, Powerpoint and all the other windows software. Plus all the people that know how to use the windows software vs Linux equivalents (if they exist).

[bregma]

Purchasing decisions are made by purchasing managers. Purchasing managers spend their time torturing numbers in spreadsheets, writing reports, and getting free lunches from channel sales reps. Microsoft is just a sales organization with some technical prowess, and their channel reps are very effective.

Technical arguments, logic, and sense do not contribute much to purchasing decisions in the corporate world.

[Asmod4n]

The business world runs on Windows, no way around that unless you only need a simple cash register and inventory software.