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 3d ago

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

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Benjamin Balder Bach 3d 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.

Ole Guldberg 3d ago

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reynir

@benjaoming from my old job the support contracts were important to the higher ups. It was mostly Oracle instead of Microsoft but still. Nevermind that the actual support wasn't that great. I think it was important to them that there was a (magic) contract.