Mastodawn

Back in ~2001, me and my colleague (both young, self-taught devs) were very annoyed that the whole company had setup shop on Microsoft. It was especially MS SQL that we had a hard time with. It was slow, expensive and lacked features.

So in our spare time, we created a version of the entire website running on a free, faster MySQL.

The IT manager hated it, and the owners blocked it. Looking back, we were surrounded by Microsoft "fanboys", so even "cheaper + faster" didn't reach through.

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reynir 6d ago

@benjaoming do you remember any of their objections? Something with support services maybe?

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Benjamin Balder Bach 6d ago

@reynir it was back in the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) days, I'm almost sure it was about how costly it would be - that we didn't have support services was almost definitely also a factor. I guess back then, a lot of proposals to use Microsoft alternatives were refuted this way?

But I also felt that people had this huge fascination/loyalty about the shiny tools from Windows Server, ASP.NET etc.

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Benjamin Balder Bach

@reynir No surprise that we're on our 3rd decade of total dominance by Microsoft Certification programs and packaged software license monopoly.. the early marketing/hype culture had already done so much to how people thought?