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The Empire In Decline?
An anonymous reader writes "Pundits continue to weigh in on Steve Sinofsky's sudden exit from Microsoft (as executive head of Windows Division, he oversaw the development and release of Windows 7 and 8). SemiAccurate's Charlie Demerjian sees Microsoft headed for a steep decline, with their habit of creating walled gardens deliberately incompatible with competitors' platforms finally catching up to them. Few PC users are upgrading to Windows 8 with its unwanted Touch UI, sales of the Surface tablet are disappointing, and few are buying Windows Phones. On the Sinofsky front, Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley is willing to take the Redmond insiders' word that the departure was more about Sinofsky's communication style and deficiencies as a team player than on unfavorable market prospects for Windows 8 and Surface. Meanwhile, anonymous blogger Mini-Microsoft had suspiciously little to say."
From what I can find around the web, he was asked to leave due to his way of working with people, not the products he created, which frankly are good. Windows 7 is good. Windows 8 is better (not perfect but better).
Now that may mean he gets the job done but they didnt like his methods, or they didnt like the job he did, and the methods. but whatever. NEXT
Apple still does well with walled gardens all over the fucking place. Not that I approve of that, but lets not rip MS apart when the competition is fucking worse.
I'm not fan of Microsoft. It's a huge bureaucracy that stifles the innovation of a lot of very bright people who work there. I would not be surprised at all to learn that their late-to-the-party tablet isn't selling well.
However, I've not seen any concrete evidence that Surface tablet sales are "disappointing." There were some vaguely-worded comments by Ballmer in a French magazine or something, and something about a few people returning the table after discovering that they couldn't run their existing apps, but that's about it. From what I've read, Surface seems to be selling. Does anyone have any concrete numbers?
Canonical offers an app store which just a package manager prettied up. if you think that's a walled garden then all Linux distros are a walled garden.
Disclaimer: I am a nobody. A simple techie. I left Microsft last year because I felt they were in turmoil internally. Managment where I worked was heinous and ineffective.
MS has long seemed like it's playing catch up with the IT world. They don't seem to grok what people want. People WANT to move to the "cloud" -- as amorphous as that term is. When I met with customers I was expected to use Bing to look things up in the MS universe and say that I was "binging" this or that. I was asked to also bring up Office 365 at every opportunity.
What keeps MS alive is the corporate sector. What with Google and Apple eating MS's lunch at every turn in the consumer space, it doesn't matter why Sinofsky left. MS is an also ran in the Internet/device/OS world. They are becoming like RIM... irrelevant. Nobody cares anymore.
People want devices and software that are "now" and hip, that are scalable and easy to use. Win 8 is a point and click nightmare. I "lived" with the RP for a few months and was constantly going back to Linux to get real work done. No thanks, MS. I'm done with you. I've embraced better solutions for me and mine.
Come on now, what kind of crappy article is this. MSFT releases a ton of new stuff and has successful products and products that fail, for example:
Zune
Bing
Surface
Windows Phones
Windows 98, ME, Vista, 8
Tons of Server products that suck
But for each that sucks there are a ton that are great :
Windows 95, NT, XP, 7, Server 2003, 2008, 2012
Exchange Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint, ISA Server
XBox, Xbox 360
It's important to test new business models and related fields they may be able to compete in (search, mobile, etc.) but they won't win them all, they can't, else they will be balls deep in Anti-Trust suits again. Declaring the decline of the "empire" is horse shit.
I have two thoughts on this issue. The first is: Pies.
That's my first thought on any issue.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I wouldn't count them out due to one word: Inertia.
Enterprises still use the stuff, and will use it for quite a good amount of time. This gives Microsoft something that few others have: time to correct its screwups.
The debacle of Vista would have killed most other tech companies, but thanks to inertia and near-total monopoly, Microsoft had room to breathe while it fixed its messes. I think the same story will hold true here. This is similar to Intel having a chance to clean up all that NetBurst/RAMBUS bullcrap when the Pentium 4 first came out, as an example.
Now how long and how much breathing room? Hard to say, especially now that the competition has stepped up its game by quite a bit more than they had in 2006, and with mobile consumer devices forming a huge wildcard.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Ballmer needed to blame someone and started throwing him under the bus. Being a smart guy, he left before the bus arrived.
The board should have fired Ballmer and given Steve a huge bonus to return and run the place.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hey!
Microsoft will sell to "Enterprise".
GM will ALWAYS fleet cars.
They just won't make a sedan you'd buy, yourself. Mazda and VW will trounce the value/dollar every day of the week.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There's really no alternative to Windows for most desktop and laptop usage, and there are "apps" to hide or disable the silly touch UI in Win so that the reasonable Win 7 UI can be used. Trying to use Linux on a laptop or desktop in a real work environment is a deadend, and Macs are a niche - so what's left?
This isn't really true at all. A GM car is fine in a fleet car - it has a dealer network, a steering wheel, instrumentation, pedals, and a shift lever... Just like every other car.
If Microsoft loses the consumer market, it will lose the corporate market as well. Microsoft owns the corporate desktop market, because users are familiar with it's products. Although it might be cheaper from a licensing and maintenance perspective to put everyone on Ubuntu, the cost of re-training all your employees to use LibreOffice and Unity greatly exceeds the cost of licensing the products.
If however, users become more familiar with another platform, it would start to make much more sense to simply employ that platform in your corporate space. Consider ChromeOS; it's cheap, easy, and readily available. If users become comfortable with that platform, there's absolutely no reason why most of the corporate desktop work couldn't be done on that platform. Microsoft would be in trouble.
A walled garden is a system where the user is somehow prevented from using anything outside of the intended system. Let's see now, on Ubuntu (or any other modern Linux distribution) you can:
- Add/remove repositories for the package manager
- Install local packages using only the installation tools
- Unpack archives manually or otherwise manually add software to the system
- Compile your own software
It's not the presence of a package manager that makes something a walled garden; it's the absence of other methods of installing software.
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I don't know about everyone else, but the users where I'm at are way more comfortable with using something different than they've ever been. Sales staff push for services like salesforce. All kinds of users gripe that they'd prefer to work on a mac, both on the desktop and with laptops.
The remaining mental lock-in nowadays, where I come from, is really just Exchange+Outlook. Of course you can get Outlook to work with other combinations of services, and you can use different clients with Exchange, but what the users are used to is the utility afforded by using the two together.
Obviously this is just what I see at work... your situations likely differ.
As a former admin, I can say I've never heard of such training. For advanced 3d drafting software we sent people away for a week, but for office software people just figured it out. I also sat through the IBM shift to OpenOffice and Firefox, both occurred without training to 100,000+ people.
Nobody is trained to use consumer websites, but they still get considerable use. The web is like touch interfaces: Developers are wary of off-screen features (right-click, long, tap, etc). As these better rules roll out, the next major UI platform is going to be the web (on any architecture), because all people need is their software.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
The article is a huge sham, and makes all kinds of claims that it simply can't back up.
For example, the claim that Windows phones aren't selling. They've only been on the market for a couple of days, and 3 phones are on the market, and only one vendor has them. There is absolutely NO way to know whether or not Windows phones are going to be popular or not.
Based on initial reaction, however, and long lines outside ATT stores, it looks like they're off to a good start.
Likewise, the Surface tablets are only available online and in a few dozen stores so far. So there's no possible way to judge how well they will do overall once they're available everywhere. Plus, the more powerful Surface Pro's aren't even on the market yet, and many of the third party devices (like Sony's new models) have yet to ship.
Finally, we can see tell-tale signs of bias in the writing. "Unwanted touch interface"? Really? Who doesn't want a touch interface in a tablet? or Phone? And lots of people seem very keen on having a touch interface in their desktops.
There is an interesting class of internet troll that loves to find any outlet they can to claim that Touch in windows is unwanted, and this seems to be the case here.
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I wouldn't count them out due to one word: Inertia.
Microsoft has a monopoly on two things: Desktop OS and Desktop Productivity. Every other market (Server OS, Database, Consoles, etc) has healthy competition.
Microsoft's problem is that the concept of the "Desktop" is in question. We are still going to use monitors & keyboards for a long time, but we're also going to be using tablets and phones/pdas. We want all of our data and work and entertainment to transfer seamlessly from one device to another. On top of that, we're going to want our session state to transfer, so we can resume things right where we left off. We want total hardware agnosticism.
Accomplishing this will require a UI revolution on the order of what windowing did to the command line, and nobody has invented it yet. The answer may not even come from one of the established players (although MS, Apple, and Google have the biggest head start). Whoever gets it right will win big.
Inertia only helps if your market is stable. Microsoft is, and probably always be, the King of the Desktop, in the same way that IBM was King of the Mainframe. Their problem is that their empire might be built on quicksand.
Investors don't care about inertia. They care about growth. Microsoft really has nowhere left to grow, at least nowhere that hasn't already been solidly claimed by another company. Their stock has been flat for 10 years. That's a long fucking time. Who wants to invest in a company without much real visible future growth potential? So the investors will pull out, and MS will coast on "inertia" for a while, but then what? What's their long-term plan for growth? I don't see them competing effectively in any market, at least with Ballmer at the wheel.
The article is a huge sham, and makes all kinds of claims that it simply can't back up. For example, the claim that Windows phones aren't selling.
I'm pretty confident that Windows phones aren't selling. in fact its still being outsold by Symbian and Bada...and RIM. Moving exclusivity to windows Phone destroyed Nokia.
> I see a lot of criticism of Windows 8, but I don't see a lot of folks
> that have actually tried to use it with a touch screen device.
If you think students are going to write 10,000-word-essays, or corporate types will do large spreadsheets or reports, or programmers will code 10,000-line-programs with a touchscreen device, you are totally out of it. And no, I'm not going to pay twice as much for a Surface as for a real PC, and then go out and buy a bluetooth keyboard plus mouse.
In the mid-1980's, the MS-DOS PC walked all over VT100 terminals as far as getting serious work done was concerned. That's why it was adopted so fast. Touchscreens are so-so for 140-character tweets, or short Fecesbook updates. They suck for real work in the corporate world. Windows 8 is going nowhere, fast. MS better release a "back to the future" Windows 9, or simply start charging for Windows 7 service packs.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Metro is a piece of shit. It's a tablet interface, and Microsoft is attempting to shove it up the asses of desktop users. Every time I point that out I get modded down as a troll or flamebaiting. Here we go again...
Really what is the point in reading about Microsoft on slashdot. You only ever get the most negative side of the story and all there accomplishments never make it to the site. How many people know that Microsoft just demonstrated real time voice to voice translation using the original speakers own voice and the translated speech is in the correct order for the new language? (that is news for nerds as far as i'm concerned) But instead we have had six stories about how Microsoft is evil and forcing everyone to use a new version of windows that's completely broken and no one any where will ever be able to use it. Reddit is kicking your ass in journalism /.
Rocket Surgeon.
Its not just inertia, its the fact that other than the "Star Trek rule" stinkers (WinME/Vista/8) most folks? they are quite happy with Windows. And why shouldn't they be? After SP 2 WinXP was good, in fact its still being used over a decade after release because many are happy with it, and Win 7 is a damned good, rock solid OS with several features that make your work easier, breadcrumbs, jumplists, and superfetch just to name a few, so why shouldn't people just stick with what they like? XP is still good until 2014, Win 7 is good until 2020, why try to fix what ain't broke?
But as somebody that sells PCs and has since Win 3.1 I am really getting tired of the pundits and their "Post PC" horseshit, they have NO clue as to what is REALLY happening on the ground and nobody is replacing their PCs for a fricking cellphone!
I'll be happy to tell you what IS happening and what IS reality is...my dad. My dad is the perfect example of what is called a "typical user" today, he surfs, chats, uses FB, burns DVD, runs his Quickbooks, watches videos, he is as typical as you can possible get of an average Windows PC user. So when the price dropped on the Phenom IIs I thought to myself "Well it has been a few years since I built that cheap AM2 Phenom quad for my dad, maybe its time to build him a new system" so I set his PC to log his usage for a couple of weeks, then I came back and looked at the data. What did I find? 45%, that is what I found. Now we are talking a Phenom I with the TLB bug and a max speed of 2.2Ghz and the MOST he stressed that quad is 45% and that turned out to be a hung browser tab.
So the PC and MSFT are NOT going away, but when AMD and Intel hit the thermal wall and decided to switch from the MHz war to the core war the chips they produced, hell even for the low end like the Athlon triples or the first gen Core based Pentiums on the laptops, are just sooooo damned powerful the users just aren't stressing them so they just ain't needing replaced nearly as often.
I predict we have less than 3 years before we see mobile, which TFA thinks is to blame (Protip: Its not) have the same damned thing happen to it that happened to X86. i mean look at what is going on, they've switched to the core wars over MHz wars, and just like with X86 you are seeing a race to the bottom with even the low end starting to sport 1.2Ghz dual cores. i predict this time next year you'll see Android 5 dual core 7 inch tablets for $50, 10 inch quads for around $150, and just like with X86 everybody that wants one will have multiple units and will find there isn't any point in upgrading. The only except will be Apple, but as I've said before what saves Apple from hard times is they are NOT a tech company that makes fashionable devices but a FASHION company that just happens to make tech devices. That is why the only items you see people line up and camp out for are Air Jordans and Apple products, using last year's iPhone is as unhip as wearing last year's Jordans.
So MSFT and Windows won't be going anywhere, they just have to accept that people aren't gonna toss machines every 3 years like they did during the MHz wars. Hell as a gamer i used to have to replace my machine every year and a half like clockwork, now I'm gaming on an AMD Hexacore that was released nearly 3 years ago and see ZERO reason to upgrade more than the GPU. Hell even my low end system for the past five years have been a minimum of a triple core with 4gb of RAM and 500gb HDDs, what is the average user gonna do to slam that chip? Not a damned thing, which is why they'll hang onto it for years, if it ain't broke....
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
>I don't really understand why there is so much hatred of the Windows 8 interface.
Because on anything other than a tablet, it's shit. It's a schizophrenic interface that tries to deprecate the desktop interface in favor of this new touch bullshit.
The thing is though, keyboards and mice are better input devices than touch. Touch is only useful when you have no other way to input, have an enviroment that is hostile to other input devices, or external input devices are inconvenient, even if it's just a stylus.
Microsoft is chasing this mythical beast called the "universal interface" which doesn't friggin' exist. They've been doing this shit since trying to force a desktop metaphor onto tablets and PDAs, eventually finding out that people don't like poking at tiny icons with a stylus which can be lost down a catchbasin. But instead, we have error in the opposite direction - forcing an interface suited to tablets and phones onto the desktop, where it SUCKS.
Also
>new account
>buzzword bingo
Shill.
--
BMO
The debacle of Vista would have killed most other tech companies, but thanks to inertia and near-total monopoly, Microsoft had room to breathe while it fixed its messes.
Vista peaked with a global market share of 20 to 25 percent.
Not half bad considering that most installs can be traced back to the retail purchase of a fairly muscular and expensive 64 bit OEM Home Premium system bundle.
... Although it might be cheaper from a licensing and maintenance perspective to put everyone on Ubuntu, the cost of re-training all your employees to use LibreOffice and Unity greatly exceeds the cost of licensing the products.
It is surprising to me (jaded as I am) that businesses and governments fail to recognize that the conversion effort and retraining needed to shift between the recent (read: last decade or more) "upgrades" of MS products is no different than that required to move to open platforms.
I moved from MS to Linux (and associated open applications) many years ago. I have saved hundreds (nay, thousands) of dollars in license fees by doing so. Open data formats have saved my bacon on more than one occasion. I've been able to rescue and reformat data for my friends and employers with open source applications on many occasions.
OK, so I'll take that back, as you're reasonable.
It's been happening a lot lately though (the new-account shill thing).
With regards to your argument that 8 is for tablets. Microsoft *had* to go to a touch interface for tablets . I agree, totally, that touch is needed on tablets, PDAs, music players, and phones. It's even better than vocal control. What Microsoft has done is continue on this path to their mythical "universal interface" that totally ignores the fact that people use different sized devices for different purposes. What they did instead was take the touch interface for tablets and shoehorn it into a desktop operating system. This goes against every study over the past 40+ years showing that people don't like holding their hands in front of them with light pens or their fingers touching a screen. SAGE is dead. Light pens are dead. Touch on the desktop never took off, and that wasn't because of a lack of touch software or touch enabled monitors (NEC had a great one in the mid 80s). Touch winds up doing data collection on factory floors, industrial equipment, and POS terminals, tablets, PDAs, and phones, for the reasons I listed in my previos message.
Anyone who has seriously interacted with Metro on the desktop hates it and it's not like you can avoid Metro. And you can't claim that I don't know what I'm talking about, because I've used it ever since the same day the Developer Preview came out. People have been talking about this for over a year.
Yet Microsoft refuses to listen to the desktop and laptop users, because they have an agenda to push, and they think that pushing touch on desktop and laptops will get people to do everything on tablets. The first sign that they don't give a shit about the desktop and laptop users was when they ripped out, the start menu registry entry and the code tied to it just to make sure.
Touch on a desktop or laptop? Not a chance. I'm not rubbing my greasy fingers all over a 27 inch monitor. I'm not doing CAD on a tablet. No.
The hate for 8 (hey that rhymes) is not unfounded. It's from people who have screwed around with this Frankenstein Monster since 2 Septembers ago. And despite all the naysaying of the Windows shills that "Microsoft's gonna fix that" even past the RTM, the root criticisms of 8 were never addressed. Instead, the reaction was more like the reaction from the Gnome 3 devs - "Fuck you, we know what we're doing."
8 is a failure on the desktop. It is inconvenient to the point of unusable.
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BMO
But, it could put a huge dent in both's market share.
I'm intrigued how. Microsoft Phone failed when it had positive reviews; Nokia still had reasonable market share, and a plan to convert existing users from Symbian it didn't work. Samsung and HTC and LG [now android exclusive and profitable again] were manufactures that didn't work. It had an opportunity to convert that tiny market share by growing its own group of fanatics; It threw them under the bus with an OS update. Arguing its an improved OS on improved hardware is not enough, iOS and Android both have improved hardware and OS's, and will not stumble. In all likelihood Microsoft will be less successful, and is less resilient to mistakes..
The bottom line though is right now people desire iOS and Android phones...but aren't interested in Windows Phone whatever the version or hardware. The new strategy looks a lot like the old strategy, with the exception of Windows 8 ecosystem [sic], and the treat to OEM's of first party hardware [whatever you think of that]. I personally cannot think of one single compelling reason why my next phone should be windows, and multiple reasons why not, and your arguments reflect that.
Really? I would never hire any admin that can't handle at least a handful of OS'es. If there is a new OS, as an admin, I am supposed to learn about it and get some hands-on experience. It's built-in to my job to learn new things.
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Everyone talks about growth as the be all and end all. Microsoft is already pretty big. As long as they remain profitable, they don't really need to grow to stay in business.
I know the thought process behind forcing the apps to be full screen, but the problem is that this model simply doesn't work for the desktop. Currently, the main reason for having a desktop as opposed to a mobile device (at least, to ma and pa yehaaw) is that a desktop is where you get real work done, e.g. drafting, creating a powerpoint presentation, etc. Touch devices (even with large screens) don't really work too well for that. The keyboard and mouse will be around for a long time to come for this reason. Likewise, the full screen app model simply will not fly on the desktop, that I am certain of.
A perfect example I can think of, is just now when I was entering in configuration commands into some cisco routers, I had three telnet windows open, an excel window which contained subnet layouts and IP addresses, one visio window which contained a physical network topology, another visio window which contained a logical network topology, and a web browser with a command reference page open.
How on earth would I do such a thing using metro? I'm sure you could, but it would be dreadfully slow and downright frustrating compared to being able to have multiple windows open at once. Imagine having to alt-tab through all of those windows each time I need to refer to something else. It would be a nightmare, whereas with overlapping windows I can simply glance at my references rather than figure out how many times I have to press tab in order to get what I am looking for.
While I'm aware of the ability to run two apps alongside one another (I think they might call that "modern UI snap" now? lol) it is really wanting in the face of having multiple windows open. Telnet and excel both depend heavily upon being able to have page width, and not height, which is what metro snap aims for.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Metro works nicely on handheld touchscreen devices. On the desktop? Meh. I have a couple of 2560x1440 panels. Windows knows that I have a mouse and keyboard and the monitors are not touch screens. It should be smart enough to come up with a better UI for this configuration. It's ridiculous that when I open the weather app, it goes full screen. Does Microsoft really believe four million pixels are needed to tell me if it's going to rain tomorrow?
As a developer, Metro sucks. Windows really are invaluable when programming. I want my IDE open, API docs open, the application running, a console tailing a log, and maybe even a chat window or email client running. I have more than enough pixels and I'm running an operating system called "Windows". Why can't I actually have windows?
You missed the point dude. It's not about whether or not someone is able to learn a new OS, It's about the cost of doing so. No matter how flexible you are, you are going to be slower work in an environment you're not used to. Lost productivity probably costs a lot more than you think.
I understand what this was all about. Microsoft's plan was to quickly force the RT environment on people so they would automatically be members of the new ecosystem and feel naturally inclined to buy the phones and tablets, especially once they realized you could do more with RT than with iOS. But as things stand now, every time someone is forced to use the RT interface against their will, they are reminded of how their options have been restricted. No matter how good RT is, if it serves as a reminder of a bad feeling, it will be tainted by that. Instead of bringing people into the fold, RTs involuntary start screen drives people away.
Even so, I think Microsoft can still rescue Windows 8 if it just does a few things.
1) Issue an apology and bring back the start button as an optional item, and allow people to boot directly to the desktop. (Yes I know... just like Start8 / Classic Shell) It seems to me that a huge percentage of gripes have been about those two things, starting long before RTM. Why fight against what your customers want?
2) Buy up a couple of good RT games and release them as free gifts to upgraders. $45 in free software! The OS pays for itself!!
3) Reposition Windows 8 as an improved desktop environment PLUS free games PLUS a Windows Phone 8 compatible OS skin which people can use or not use.
Yes, the restoration of the start button and starting desktop means RT use will grow more slowly, only at the pace that people want to try it out. But in the long run, it will make for a better user experience, one that people will want to return to.
The marketing of Windows 8 has been horribly arrogant. By pissing off geeks, MS has alienated its proselytizers and enthusiasts. By pissing off businesses, it has affected its own bottom line. Every day that this debacle continues is one less opportunity that MS has to set things right.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
You are not an admin. You are a regurgitator. I'm not trying to be a dick, I just want you to realize where you actually fit in the food chain.
An admin has no trouble shifting to new environments on the fly. He/she doesn't think twice about doing so, its just part of the job. No OS is so different that it matters, even the jump from UNIX to Windows is trivial if you are qualified to call yourself an admin.
Just because you have root on some boxes doesn't make you an admin.
Yes, there is a cost to the switch, but if that cost is significant for a given 'admin' then it shows that you are unable to quickly adapt to a new environment and find the resources you need to complete the job. Windows admin really isn't THAT different now days, the answer to any problem is almost certainly a Google away in any case you're likely to hit. I can safely say that because someone at your level isn't going to be doing anything that hasn't been done a million times before.
In my career, I've dealt with more than one person like you. Not that there is anything wrong with you, but you think you are more capable than you are in one respect while realizing you aren't in others. My typical treatment towards someone like this is to nudge them towards finding a 'higher paying' job else where and get them out of my umbrella. They'll generally fail, but then they also generally get the point and learn the difference, and their next job works out a whole lot better for them. This may not be 'nice', but being nice typically doesnt' get the point across or you would have realized it already.
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In the Windows 7, Vista, XP, and Mac OSX world (so, almost all users), the standard method of installing software is still:
1) Go to the website
2) Download the installation file (or get a disk if you're feeling retro)
3) Run the installation programme
This works in Ubuntu too- you go to the website, and download the .deb package. Double click it, run it. You don't have to be a geek to do this; the fact that mobile phones don't let you do this doesn't mean it's been scrubbed from the users' skillset quite yet. And as long as this remains an option, it is fundamentally not a walled garden.
If Microsoft loses the consumer market, it will lose the corporate market as well. Microsoft owns the corporate desktop market, because users are familiar with it's products.
That logic might apply for the Desktop OS, but like most MS bashers you seem to have not taken into account the monopoly MS has with AD/DNS/DHCP/GPO/Exchange/SQL/IIS and the corporate back office ecosystem that everyone knows and understands. There simply isn't anything that comes close to this*, and if you're not moving away from that, then you may as well make life easier for yourself and keep an MS desktop too. I don't see MS going anywhere. Worst case is Win8 flops, and MS maintain support for Win7 until they release a replacement, then life carries on. *Feel free to post a suggested replacement. But don't bother with a hodge podge home brew mix of unsupported free apps. Any viable replaceble has to have the same or better features, with the same or better UI, and the same or better support.