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Red Hat and Microsoft Partner On Azure (redhat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Satya Nadella has made some interesting reforms to Microsoft. Today, Red Hat and Microsoft announced that they will partner to deliver Red Hat's product suite in Azure. Red Hat will also support .NET core in RHEL. Additionally, Red Hat's CloudForms product will now work with Hyper-V/Azure, RHEV, VMware, and AWS. Microsoft has certainly come a long way from the Halloween Memos. Here are Red Hat's blog post and Microsoft's blog post about the announcement
Hell just froze over.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
I'm not surprised. After all, the architecture and philosophy of Red Hat's systemd appears to be very much inspired by the architecture and philosophy of Windows. Systemd is all about one-thing-doing-everything-poorly, which has typically been the Windows approach, rather than the traditional UNIX approach of many-things-each-doing-one-thing-very-well. Systemd represents the Windowsification of Linux distributions, which have traditionally taken a much more UNIX-like approach. Bringing Windows and systemd/Linux together like this makes perfect sense, because they do complement one another due to their similarities.
Cue the comments about angry people switching from RedHat to another Linux distro.
Fight for your bitcoins!
Last I checked, Azure has Ubuntu Server. :)
Finding God in a Dog
A single binary blob, accessible of course by APIs, mostly APIs written for desktop operating systems, for all of your system config needs!
Microsoft's goal is to do everything poorly? I think that's taking the Linux fanboi thing a little too far, my friend. No company could stay in business if their goal was to do everything poorly.
Reading comprehension ... he wrote "is all about one-thing-doing-everything-poorly, which has typically been the Windows approach". Windows goal, not Microsoft goal.
Microsoft software DOES tend to be Swiss Army Knife. MS Word has THOUSANDS of menu and option items. I just right-clicked a random place on my screen and saw that Excel sorts on FONT COLOR.
Unix/Linux on the other hand, uses the "sort" program. It sorts. That's all. It doesn't do calculations, it doesn't know about fonts. It sorts, period.
Because "sort" only sorts, and "cut" only cuts, they are each good at what they do. Excel and other Microsoft software, on the other hand, has thousands of functions, they don't specialize in one thing. Much like a Swiss Army knife, which includes a dozen tools - tiny scissors, a two-inch saw, etc.
Neither is necessarily right or wrong, but of course a saw is better at sawing than a Swiss Army knife is, and a standard pair of scissors is better at scissoring than the tiny scissors included in a Swiss Army Knife. On the other hand, a Swiss Army knife is also very useful.
Systemd is a Swiss Army knife - it tries to pack everything and the kitchen sink into one multi-purpose thing. That's not inherently good or bad, it -is- Microsoft-like, not Unix-like.
At this point Lennart points out that systemd contains multiple binaries. Yeah, and a Swiss Army knife contains multiple blades.
(1) do everything poorly, but ship soon, and if you can't ship, bullshit and ship later
(2) get contracts with everyone, do whatever it takes but get the contracts, let some pirate your stuff if they want to just as long as they're running it so maybe they can buy something later
(3) stay in business. profit where you can, funnel the cash into places where you can't profit yet
whereas Apple is
(1) sell luxury products
(2) people who buy Apples do it to supplement their image, and defend the Apple brand in all forums in order to make themselves look good
(3) profit. lots and lots of profit.
and Linux is
(1) make cool stuff
(2) people use it and extend it. Developer users, professional and hobbyist, rave about how nice it is, because they feel a sense of shared ownership of the code
(3) The best extensions are added to the base, in small pieces that each do one thing really well
And after three decades of Microsoft earning zero trust I think I'll continue to take a pass. ...And remain skeptical.
I would add Red Hat has come a long way too. Away from the free software community on which they were built. Forcing systemd down our throats. They are no better than Micro$oft. There was a time when such a collaboration would have been unthinkable.
After playing Mass Effect, every time I read the word "Azure" I think "In the lower wards, near the bottom."
Explenation for those of you who did not play it, Azure is a ritsy alien brothel named after a part on the Asari body. Asari is a mono-gendered race of blue ladies with tentacle hair. I'm sorry, at this point it may as well be named Microsoft Vag.
Don't get me wrong, basically having active directory that isn't limited to local network is really cool... just that name though.
1. Get your favorite adult beverage
2. Take a shot for every post on this topic that contains one of the following phrases, "it's a trap!", "Micro$oft", "M$", "embrace, extend, extinguish", and posts that mentions shit that happened back in the 1990s.
3. Die of alcohol poisoning.
We're in the middle of the planning for the Windows 7 to 10 transition, and 2008 R2 to 2016, so we're getting plenty of face time with the premier support guys. The message is abundantly clear -- Microsoft is done selling one-off licensed software. Everything is going to be Azure based in their mind, and on-premises installations of software are the exception now. Server 2016 has so many Azure hooks that it might as well not have been released as a standalone product. Windows 10's updating model relegates stable releases to a much more minority position than they were in the past...it requires an Enterprise Agreement/Software Assurance to deploy Windows 10 LTSB and avoid constant cumulative upgrades.
In an environment like this, where they're moving back to mainframe style custodial IT service models, why wouldn't they partner with Red Hat or any other OS vendor for that matter? They want companies to move everything into Azure, not leave some bits hanging out on-premises or with another cloud provider. The Windows vs. Linux wars are cooling off because vendors sense the juicy returns in the cloud. Why sell software once when you can force businesses to pay over and over again for decades to use your resources/products? I've said before that both Amazon and Microsoft are building their clouds on the backs of Bubble 2.0, so funding is plentiful and therefore prices are incredibly cheap. The thing to watch will be when the bubble bursts, and a duopoly exists...will those low prices continue?
Microsoft should buy RedHat and provide offerings that make RHEL more compatible with a Microsoft server environment. Makes total business sense for both companies.
Otherwise, Amazon Web Services is going to eat their lunch (both Microsoft's and RedHat's)
Someone you trust is one of us.
Typical of Slashdot this is modded up. "M$ is crap, Apple is for fanbois, linux is for the leet haxors"
Apple, Linux and Microsoft all have their places. Variety is amazing versus the Mono-culture of Windows.
I like Apple OS X, I like apple hardware that they make an effort in industrial design and to be different.
If I want to roll my own, I like that I can buy lots of different cases, motherboards, monitors etc.
More operating systems to be able to choose from would be good though.
I like and use Linux, tried lots of different distros; occasionally I fire up a Windows VM to do something that has a good application for it.
This new 21st century tech culture kinda sucks. Variety is shunned, More variety in the OS and hardware market is needed not less.
We had lots to choose from early on -- Commodore, Atari, Tandy, Apple, Sinclair, Osborne, IBM, the list goes on and on.
I miss the choice, freedom, and excitement.
Now get off my lawn.
then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
We won.
Best Slashdot Co
since before their IPO. This isn't that surprising at all other than that they survived this long and are now wanting to work together with said Evil.
Ok, I have to ask. While I understand why everyone is upset with systemd, why don't other similar programs get the same level of snub? OpenBox taking the place of a shell and a litany of GNU utilities is probably the most obvious example.
More variety in end user and server operating systems is a thing of the past. These beasts are expected to be the complex biests they are today in order to be considered for serious use. And they actually do need a lot of the inherent complexity to perform well on current hardware. In lockstep, applications have become more complex over time (again, to satisfy user expectations) and porting them to completely new and different operating systems has become a non-trivial effort.
Thus, new operating systems meet with a barrier to entry that is both extremely high and unlikely to go away for a long time.
EOM
OpenBox, whatever it actually is, wasn't forced into Debian, Ubuntu, and pretty much every other major Linux distro completely against the will of the users of these distros. That's a big part of the reason why people don't dislike OpenBox. People don't get angry with something if it doesn't cause them any problems. But people do get royally pissed off when something totally unwanted is basically forced up their rectums. That's exactly what systemd was like to many Debian users: repeated, forced penetration of one's anus with an object that's large, sharp and rusty. It hurts a lot to have Debian systems that were first installed years ago, upgraded flawlessly many times over, only to have them ruined unnecessarily when systemd was forced upon Debian users. We told the Debian maintainers that we didn't want systemd. We saw the problems it had caused for so many others, and we didn't want to fall victim to it, either. We told them again and again and again that we wanted no part of systemd. We didn't want it on our systems. We didn't want it even considered for inclusion into Debian. Yet we were treated like dogshit. We were treated like scum. We had systemd forced onto our unwilling Debian installations. It's really disappointing when a distro like Debian, which was pretty much flawless for years on end, even when using its unstable version, suddenly becomes less reliable than Windows ME all thanks to systemd. It's like your internal organs are being torn out when your Debian installation may start to randomly fail to boot after doing what should be routine updates. It's a pain that nobody should ever feel.
Blah blah blah.
Systemd is most inspired by the init system of Solaris 10 ... you know, Solaris, from Sun Microsystems, the biggest Unix vendor during the golden age of Unix.
Systemd is not inspired by windows just because you don't like either one, so they must be the same.
Complexity wasn't in my original argument but I don't buy that varIety in hardware and operating systems is a natural detriment to complexity. The fact that I can fire up different operating systems in VM's or run applications that are available in win/Linux/Mac versions proves this. Application frameworks have existed for decades that allow portability of applications between systems. Unfortunately vendors not playing nice with standards (I'm looking at you Microsoft) means they can lock in their software to their OS. Unfortunately the idea that technological monoculture is essential for "serious" computing is just too ingrained.
That's a big part of the reason why people don't dislike OpenBox. People don't get angry with something if it doesn't cause them any problems. But people do get royally pissed off when something totally unwanted is basically forced up their rectums.
Yeah, that's exactly why I don't dislike Apple nearly as much as I dislike Microsoft, despite all these claims about how evil Apple is these days. Sure, Apple is evil, but I'm not being forced or pressured to use Apple products. I don't spend all my free cash on Apple crap, so it just doesn't affect me. Not so with Microsoft; it's pretty hard to have any kind of tech job without being required to use MS products.
The only time I've even used Apple products in recent memory is the last time I went to a Panera Bread and placed an order with one of their tablets. I'm fairly sure those were iPads.
He's a troll. Keeps posting off-topic whining about systemd in every story that mentions linux
Apparently he also has mod points to burn.
Apart from the colour of the aforementioned main, what's an Azure and why would I want one?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I didn't say having thousands or tens of thousands of features was a bad thing. In fact, I said it's NOT a bad thing. It's simply one of two ways to accomplish the same goal.
In the Microsoft approach, each program has thousands of features. There are maybe 6,000 features that Word, Excel, and Outlook all have, separately - they can all search, sort, etc. That's cool, it works for a lot people.
The other way is that you have a program which sorts (called sort), which searches (grep), etc. If you want to both search AND sort at the same time, you simply run both programs:
grep pattern source | sort
The cool thing about that is that you can search and sort with EVERY cli tool the same way, by simply piping it into grep or sort. Wget doesn't need to have search and sort built-in, you can just:
wget http://datafeed.com/ -O - | grep stuff
Separate, small tools is the Unix way. Both work fine ( for some definition of "fine"). Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. On Linux, I can type up a command to rename files with random numbers almost as fast as I decide I want them randomized. Creating the same program on Windows took a couple of days. On the other hand, the Windows program is -visual- you can -see- how to use it once someone programs it for you and you find and install it. The Linux command you have to figure out.
> Systemd is a wrapper
> All your little tools collected in one place
So it's a bunch of little tools wrapped together in a package, you say? That's nothing at all like a Swiss Army knife, then. A Swiss Army knife is completely different. A Swiss Army knife is a bunch of little tools wrapped together. As you said, systemd isn't that, systemd is a bunch of little tools wrapped together.
> But inherently it's a feature that Linux needs
It's quite a few features that Linux needs (98% of those being features Linux already had).
Try this some time. Delete everything on / except systemd. (Keep your kernel on /boot). You'll find you can still boot and get a shell (a systemd shell), on a system with nothing but systemd and a kernel installed. You know what you call a package of software that you can boot up and use, without depending on any other software to already be running? An _operating_system_. Look up any rigorous definition of an operating system and see if systemd+kernel isn't an operating system.
I see the reverse as you, and despise Apple by your same rationale. Of the "big 5" software companies, only at MS itself are you likely to find an environment dominated by MS. I hate having that Apple shit forced on me, itherwise I wouldn't care much about Apple.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
.NET as a default? Long term damage to Linux' reputation is where that'll go, due to the bad performance of most everything .NET regardless of platform. People will just say "it's slow" instead of understanding that "it's slow because it's using .NET". What a sorry direction to go.
I have something like the following inittab fragment that I built on my production servers:
ds:4:respawn:/home/prog/schedule.sh
da:4:respawn:/home/prog/alert.sh
cx:4:respawn:/home/prog/update.sh
cx:4:respawn:/home/prog/audit.sh...
These shell scripts mostly set a number of environment variables, then exec a runas.c program that I wrote that knocks the privilege down from root. After privilege is dropped, my runas program calls exec() on the *real* program that I want init to respawn.
This works, but it's a big pile of duct tape and bailing wire. I'm not proud of it.
I can get rid of all of that stuff with systemd, and launch it correctly:
$ cat /etc/systemd/system/broker.service
[Unit]
Description=broker
#After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target
[Service]
#ExecStartPre=
#ExecStopPost=
Environment=ORACLE_SID=mydb ORACLE_HOME=/home/oracle
ExecStart=/opt/pkg/broker
WorkingDirectory=/tmp
Type=simple
KillMode=process
Restart=always
User=nobody
#Group=nobody
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
I realize that people don't like the dbus integration, the replacement of su with systemctl shell, and many other complaints. However, this code has been carefully designed, it's reliable, and it gives me the ability to throw away a lot of my ugly glue. Call me heretic, but yes, I like it.
"After all, the architecture and philosophy of Red Hat's systemd appears to be very much inspired by the architecture and philosophy of Windows."
s/Windows/launchd and SMF/
FTFY. HTH.
There is this Amazon cloud out there. Ms tries to compete against it. Here it acts firstly as a cloud company. RedHat wants to support it better, competing with Windows. The interest is mutual. Neither Linux or Windows are going away anytime soon, epterprise users need good support for both, on all cloud platforms.
Huh? WTF are you talking about? Where on Earth are you where you're having Apple shit forced on you? Are you in a parallel universe or something?
At ANY corporate or government job in the US, you are absolutely going to have MS shit forced on you. Everyone uses MS here. There is a very, very rare (usually small) company which uses Apples, but everyplace else you go, it's all MS. Even if a company uses a lot of Linux, they usually use MS for regular Office programs and Outlook email, and you end up using Linux on another PC or in a VM.
Am I the only one who instantly thought that RH has been sucked into the MS EEE vortex? I hope this isn't the Embrace step of the classic MS behavior. Actually, have there been ANY companies that have benefited long term from working with MS?
'All the same, let's be clear that all the "Microsoft Loves Linux" hype I saw at SUSECon yesterday and at other events earlier this year is just not true. Microsoft Azure loves Linux, there is no doubt; it is a basic requirement for them to become relevant on a cloud market dominated by AWS and Linux.' ref
and Linux is (1) make cool stuff (2) people use it and extend it. Developer users, professional and hobbyist, rave about how nice it is, because they feel a sense of shared ownership of the code (3) The best extensions are added to the base, in small pieces that each do one thing really well
That is the idea, the reality is much different. In reality the Linux (and broader FOSS if we're comparing to Apple and Microsoft) community is more about trying to make a free copy of proprietary alternatives. Where is the competitive free desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, smartwatch, home automation system, etc that all work well together? Why didnt the FOSS community come up with any of these new product categories? Where is the innovation in terms of "cool stuff"? What about CAD, drafting, image, audio and video production software?
I remember when M$ embraced Novell. What ever happened to Novell anyway?
The big 5 are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. All but MS are Apple shops for laptops (and all but MS and Apple are Linux shops otherwise). Amazon and I think Facebook allow MS, but support is second-class and MS is discouraged. Google and obvious Apple only allow MS for specific business needs (competitive analysis, cross-compat testing, etc).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Redhat turned into Microsoft wannabe's (overtly) at Redhat version 8.0. It was all good until 7.3. 7.3 was decent but there were better. Many uninstalled Redhat at 7.3. I did too.
Microsoft appears to be pretending to stay relevant by being a "Linux homie" and Redhat wanted the bucks a long time ago. I would have put money on them doing this eventually. Shazam. Why all of the sudden Redhat is going "linux .NET" after Windows 10 the final bamboozle goes full spyware on the globe? Maybe they are looking for future gaming synergy/marketshare since Windows is a botched botnet now.
Ignore all marketing hype coming from Redhat/Fedora. Their synergy is "fuck you all, pay us". That is it. Swindle meets a Linux distro.
Red Hat will also support .NET core in RHEL.
How long before Redhat is the same spyware/malware/adware as Microsoft Windows? Is .NET going to be open sourced in Linux lmao.. any Linux that pulls .NET into their distro are suckers. There are way better distro's. If companies want their "paid support services" do it suckers. No home user will need it ever. Between .NET and systemd ... they are trying to make Microsoft look strong by making Linux look weak.
distrowatch.com
Embrace
You do realize that these "big 5" represent a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total employment in the US (and world), don't you? And I'm pretty sure Intel is a bigger employer than several of these; it currently has 106,700 employees. It's a mostly MS shop. And IBM is still bigger than any of these, with 380,000 employees currently.
Now I'm curious, so I went ahead and looked these up. Facebook is a puny, puny little company, with only 10,082 employees. That's a tiny 1/10 of the size of Intel. Apple is a much more sizeable 115,000, so that probably is one the top tech employers. Google has just shy of 60,000 employees, so it's actually rather small. Amazon has 222,400 employees, so it's actually become quite a large employer very quickly, considering how long they've been around (since 1994, compared to Intel which has been around since the 70s, and IBM which has been around for over a century). Finally, Microsoft has 118,584 employees.
Cisco Systems is larger than FB and Google, at 70,112 employees. Oracle has 135,070 employees, making it larger than everyone on your list except Amazon. And of course there's Samsung, which has 489,000 employers, bigger than everyone else here.
Regardless, all of these put together are still a tiny, tiny portion of employers nationwide or worldwide. Most employers are MS shops to some degree (usually a very large degree). Why do you think MS is so profitable? It's because of their Windows/Office cash cow, but also because of all their enterprise products. Apple has NO enterprise products at all, they don't even have servers. They make all their money on individuals buying iDevices.
I speak only to my personal experience, not the rest of America.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
For the first 12 years, OpenOffice/Staroffice ran only on Microsoft operating systems. It's a DOS/Windows program designed with a Microsoft style mindset, ported to Linux more than a decade after it was released. It's not The Unix Way. It's good and useful, and it's 100% a Windows program ported to Linux.
I don't give a shit about your personal experience. My whole point is that, for most people who have any kind of corporate job involving sitting at a computer, that computer is going to be running Windows. If you've avoided that somehow, then good for you (or not, if you hate Macbooks and got stuck with those), but if you believe that your experience is commonplace, you're completely deluded. Your personal experience is irrelevant for the hundreds of millions of us out here who are stuck using Windows at work.
Do you know how many distros are out there to pick from? Many of them differ in interesting ways. Not to mention, there's Minix, BSD, Plan9, etc...
I'm old. I understand but you're missing the forest for the trees. We've more choices today then we ever had! In fact, we have so many choices now that I can just try to work with something new, all the time, and I do! More often than not, I'm not even booted into a real installed operating system - so to speak. Right now, I'm sending this to you from my hotel room, on a laptop, with Lubuntu installed, running Ubuntu in a Live USB state (I was helping someone but this is not uncommon), connected via VNC, to my home computer, using a virtual machine, with GhostBSD installed, to send you this message!
No choices??? No variety? You're out of your cotton-picking mind. No. You gave up learning and settled. We have choices.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Err... If you didn't care then why'd you ask 'em where they worked? Sheesh. ;-) They tell you and you tell 'em you don't care. Silly kids these days.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Sorry you didn't read my post carefully enough, or I wasn't clear enough. You're right, there are a shit ton of variants of Linux and BSD.
I use and have tried lots of them.
BUT that's the point; they are variants of Linux and BSD. So you have the choice of Windows, OS X, or some flavor of Linux (BSD).
To get even more techical, OS X is built on BSD so that really makes it just Windows and a flavor of Linux or BSD.
To cut to the chase, there are really just THREE main umbrellas of operating systems to choose from; for every day practical use. And you know, upon reflection, that is admittedly choice. But for many, sadly only Windows enters their radar.
So am I being too curmudgeonly? Maybe. But you accuse me of giving up and not learning. Not a fair statement. The fact that I use OS X, Linux and Windows daily, as well as built my own hardware to do it means I haven't given up.
I have played with the Hercules emulator to try MVS on a PC, and a bunch of other obscure stuff new and old.
In fact, if something new and interesting comes out I will jump on it. Too bad Haiku OS hasn't made it out of Alpha version yet.
But this is getting away from my original point. ALL of this choice is great and the tecno-rabble of the 21st century deride the choices. That I don't get. This insinuation that for "serious" computing (whatever that is) Windows must be used. Apple is for "fashonistas" etc, etc.
Sorry my choices are upsetting people, I thought tech was about choice. Hence my original point; maybe it's not 21st century tech culture but the culture of Slashdot. Either way they suck.
Oh, you ranted about how you, personally, don't like MS because in your personal experience it was forced on you. Well, I have the same rant about Apple. Different people have different experiences and values, and what a boring world it would be if we were all the same.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh, your choices aren't upsetting anyone (I don't think). It's just that there's so many ways and so many variations that I'm not sure I can agree with you. Between hypervisors enabling running without actually touching the bare metal to the ability to run in kernel mode, there are countless things.
I don't know if you're a curmudgeon. I'd say you're probably jaded. Go try to install Plan9 in a VM. That'll bring back some magic. If you don't have VMWare then either pirate the hell out of it or use VirtualBox. (I think there are copies up on the torrent sites? I've not used them - I'm able to afford the stupidly expensive license. I've a stash of licenses for various versions over the years and buying a perpetual license is not possible.)
There's Minix. There's Hurd. There's even Debian/HURD. There's Android and iOS (for what they're worth). I hear good things about Windows 10, I don't actually have any experience with it but I did see it in the wild once. OS X is built off of some BSD variant I believe but different enough - I don't use it but I recommend it for those interested. There are so many flavors of Linux that it's obscene and actually confusing. My return to Linux-only was fraught with peril. Err... Or something like that.
What I really like is just having the ability to use a Live USB stick and going to a session in RAM. I never get bored. There's still so much that I don't know that I, literally, am set for the rest of my life when it comes to learning something new every single day. I'm retired and one of the things I insist on is learning new things - I want to keep my brain sharp because I'm not afraid of much but mental incapacitation scares the shit out of me. It scares me as much as maiming used to scare me. It scares me as much as being physically incapacitated while retaining full mental faculties. I'd rather eat a bullet than any of those.
So, I try to learn new stuff. All the time. Hell, I go to Stack Exchange and spend hours there reading and learning stuff. I help, when I can, though I just decided to start that recently. (Like a month ago. I'm already approaching 1000 points.)
Anyhow, I don't see what you're seeing. You can still program in BASIC. There are emulators for all that you want. There's freedom to keep that stuff going and advancing some of it as you go.
Then again, maybe I'm not your target audience or normal. I don't think any one OS is perfect and I'm kind of OS agnostic. I don't think *all* Apple users are fashionistas. Hell, I bought 62 iPads over the summer. (Long story, I've kind of, sort of, adopted my local elementary school - it's small with just 56 students and I've made friends with all the kids and the overworked IT staff of just one person.) Last time, I bought them Windows 7 laptops. I'm probably going to go with Macs and do a refresh this summer.
Well, I can say that I partially agree with what you're saying but I think that's you being your own worst enemy. The magic is still there. It's more diffused but it's there. It's hidden in far away bits of code but there for the taking. You just need to poke. A lot of us seemed to give up poking and started just being users. Maybe that's what happened to you? Buy yourself a RPi or similar. The magic is still there. It's just that the computer is akin to a toaster now. If you want to see the magic you need to take the toaster apart. If you want to learn everything, you need to do it while it's still plugged in. (Now that's taking an analogy too far but I guess it works.) Take the toaster apart and plug it in to 220. The magic is there.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You're right. I even think the number of Amazon employees includes the warehouse personnel, supply chain management staff, and some guys who convince (sales guys, actually) vendors to sell on Amazon. Some of these kinds of people may not be getting company laptops, and even if they do their primary work may not be "defined" by the OS on that laptop.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Warehouse personnel probably don't get issued computers at all; they probably have handheld devices, and probably use a few centralized computers, so they probably have to use Windows on those, but they probably don't spend that much time with them. The handheld devices are very likely to run WinCE, however, which is another kind of hell. Any kind of management staff or salespeople, however, would be using Windows all day on company-issued computers.