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I kinda figured this the first time one of my Windows colleagues showed me the uninstallable XBox services on his Active Directory controllers.

Anybody using Microsoft for IT infrastructure is either a masochist or has their family held hostage.

The reason Microsoft has such a foothold is the ease of an entry barrier. Someone with zero experience can get most Microsoft based server roles stood up in a few hours following a youtube tutorial.

Is this a headline from 2000?

Which is cool, until you get into a corporate environment, where it would be ideal for someone to know what they're doing instead of following a youtube tutorial. If you own a business and you think it's OK to use MS products because "anyone who can pay attention to youtube can do it", it's a pretty awful reason to use a product that will be responsible for a lot of work for your business.

Not implying you would advise that someone following youtube tutorials should be in IT for a business, but it's a silly reason to use a product that your business will rely on. The better reason would be that MS certs are a dime a dozen in the industry and if you need someone to handle your corporate MS environment, there's plenty of people around that can do it. You can keep costs down too since they're more disposable. But then, you still have licensing costs, which might very well make the in-house IT salary+licensing the same as a competent linux sysadmin salary.

Not to mention the standard MS update philosophy of having paying customers be de facto beta testers for their OS patches. Windows troubleshooting is never as transparent as on a unix or linux system. There's a lot of things that go into taking care of a MS environment that will make you pull your hair out, and often for less pay than if you could administrate other server operating systems at the same level.

I'll stick to having fewer opportunities for my skills to be used. When I do land something that uses them, it will be with a company that doesn't put up with MS bullshit and will pay significantly more because I'm not a dime a dozen.

I.e. quality costs money.

Is he running a pirated version? This isn’t true, and hasn’t been since like the Windows 7 (Server 2012) days. Especially for AD.