[plantain]

I just do not understand how Azure has the scale it does. You only need to login and click around for a bit to see this is not a coherent system designed by competent people. Let alone try and actually build something on it.

Who are the customers? Who is buying this shit?

[jmuguy]

From my old experience in IT - people just default to Microsoft for everything. They don't want to hassle with learning anything else and assume better the devil you know. Glad I'm out of that world but its wild what people will put up with.

[zthrowaway]

Microsoft shops. Lots of C# devs gravitate to it naturally. I’m glad I abandoned the MS stack over a decade ago.

[matt123456789]

.NET Core runs just as well on ECS though. And C# tooling is rock solid in VS Code on Mac. No need to touch Azure or Windows.

[okanat]

People and organizations that built things on top of Microsoft tech. Especially with a long history going back to NT times.

HN, YC, startup environment or academia is a Unix bubble. They all feed into each other. Especially because Linux is gratis which helped all of those to deploy projects/products/papers cheaply. Unix systems traditionally lack much of the upper layers, so it is the responsibility of the company, persons, developers to deal with the OS minutea. You need sysadmins, devops, SREs. Those are common roles again in this Unix bubble. The dependency chains here are usually flatter since it keeps mid-term costs lower.

Other organizations like governments and bigger orgs like banks prioritize having somebody else liable (i.e. they can blame) and they prefer to not hire technical competence in their orgs but rely on other companies. This is where Microsoft gets a lot of clients. You buy a bunch of server licenses. Your Microsoft support person installs them and installs IIS via GUI. And then you just upload your code every now and then. The OS updates, IIS server etc are all the responsibility of Microsoft and the middlemen companies. Minimal competence from the orginal org is required. There are multiple middlemen businesses who all give zero fucks about anything but whatever the immediate downstream from them. This is more usual in already publicly traded huge businesses. Moreover the investors actually mandate certain things that only this kind of layers of irresponsibility can deliver :) So you see this kind of switch happening towards IPOs.

Azure is the cloud labeling and forcing the first paradigm over the second paradigm for Microsoft products. It got lots of support because shareholders liked it. I don't think the original NT design and Microsoft's business model was bad, it actually worked very well. However, shareholders gonna shareholder. So they pushed hard for Microsoft and their clients to move to the "cloud". Microsoft executives saw the huge profit and share value potential of pushing Azure the brand too. It was the AI of 2010s afterall.

[whatever1]

The VPs who think that they got a good deal by combining with o365

[bwfan123]

> You only need to login and click around for a bit to see this is not a coherent system designed by competent people

Ironically, the book "Hit Refresh" hit a nerve that every azure web-page has a refresh button. Isnt that dating back to web 1.0 ?

[nijave]

Google and especially Amazon/AWS compete with a lot of large companies which drive them towards Oracle, IBM and Microsoft as escape hatches.

For instance, Walmart doesn't want to pay their largest competitor.

[p_ing]

If you put me in front of AWS I'd have the same reaction. Or GCP for that matter, where I did have your reaction.

It's familiarity and knowing how the beast operates. I know how to read the docs and understand the licensing.

Any one piece of software could be a pile of shit with a terrible UX, but you're going to find those who are so familiar with it that everything else looks alien.

[accountofthaha]

Because for some it works. At least I haven't heard the stories I see here yet at my workplace. Also I use some Azure, but apart from some weird UI bugs never had real big issues.

[CalRobert]

No idea but I think it's in half or more of the job ads I see in the Netherlands. I don't get it.

[markus_zhang]

If you are a Microsoft shop then most likely you are on Azure. Your CFO would love the costs saved.