• joel_feila@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Microsoft will easily provide all of a consulting companies employees with free Azure services, Office and other discounts if they enter in an exclusivity agreement to sell their tech stack.

      I never thought about that. my job we use some software made by oracle. I have wondered how much it would cost to make a linux version or wine compatible

      • psud@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I watched the process where a set of Unix machines we had were up for replacement. The first version of the request had as the preferred option IBM hardware and Linux, the second version - after it had been to the executives - had the preferred option as IBM hardware and AIX

        Like the exec knew what either were, but they would have had a consultant check the proposal. Then they pretend to have respect for the professionals they employ

    • nayminlwin@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Holy hell, a lot of what you just described hit right home with me.

      I started off as one of the cheap developers (“technical consultant”) for one of those Microsoft business products. Almost every single one of our customers are already ingrained into Microsoft ecosystems and setting up the system we customize and sell is mostly a matter of integrating into their existing AD, Exchange Mail Server and sometimes their private cloud. I was pretty ignorant of open source tools that would tremendously help even if you’re mostly using Microsoft. Ignorant might not be the right word. It would be more correct to say “afraid to peek out of the comfortable Microsoft bubble”. It wasn’t just me, a lot of propriety consultants don’t really bother with anything else. If something’s beyond our capabilities we can always get the support of Microsoft, supposedly. This chain of responsibility give end customers assurance somehow. Like you said, assurance on who to blame and sue at least.

      Took me a while to break out of Microsoft bubble and now I do open source ERP. I do get by okay, but I think it’s mostly because my country cannot afford Microsoft license fees.