[jussij]

I suspect all your alternate explanations as to why the server division is growing are true. The server divison is doing extremely well.

My point is I doubt very much the server division would be doing as well as it is if the Op was correct in saying people are locked into that toolchain.

Because that would suggest a lot of people would be unhappy with that situation (i.e. meaning bad press, bad word of mouth, bad for business) and many of those would also be trying desperately to leave that toolchain and succeeding (i.e. reduced sales).

The sales figures indicate the opposite is true.

[cookiecaper]

I disagree. I don't think that people have to excite a lot of negative press or otherwise make a fuss with something just because they're moderately displeased with it. Most people won't go to the effort unless the tools are egregiously bad, and we know that Microsoft's stack isn't. They can still be quietly unhappy, locked into the platform with hundreds of thousands of man-hours invested into proprietary applications that depend heavily on major, hard-to-replace platform components (see: WPF, not implemented by Mono, or Silverlight, hit and miss via the unmaintained Moonlight), and buying server licenses due to a change in the way servers are provisioned.

Moving away from .NET is a long-term proposition, and it's an expense that few companies can justify no matter how much they dislike the platform. I believe you are claiming far too much credit for MS based off of a single growth figure.

[CloudNine]

> They can still be quietly unhappy, locked into the platform with hundreds of thousands of man-hours invested into proprietary applications that depend heavily on major, hard-to-replace platform components (see: WPF, not implemented by Mono, or Silverlight, hit and miss via the unmaintained Moonlight), and buying server licenses due to a change in the way change in the way servers are provisioned.

What change in the way servers are provisioned? Many companies still use Windows Server 2003 and even .NET 4.5 is supported on it. That sounds like FUD.

>They can still be quietly unhappy, locked into the platform with hundreds of thousands of man-hours invested into proprietary applications

They can also be happy with the ease of use of Active Directory and Group Policy instead of relying on half baked convulted perl scripts cooked up by a long gone sysadmin. Please, you're just embarassing yourself with your ignorant assumptions.

[cookiecaper]

>What change in the way servers are provisioned? Many companies still use Windows Server 2003 and even .NET 4.5 is supported on it. That sounds like FUD.

I explained this in my initial post in this thread. Virtual machines are having a major effect on the provisioning of servers, requiring more OS licenses than prior. The person I replied to conceded this point.

>They can also be happy with the ease of use of Active Directory and Group Policy instead of relying on half baked convulted perl scripts cooked up by a long gone sysadmin.

LDAP

>Please, you're just embarassing yourself with your ignorant assumptions.

You weren't capable of processing my first post, and are now harassing me for discussing Microsoft in a MS thread, so who should be the embarrassed one here?