SQL Server, Sharepoint, Active Directory and Office are all platforms in their own right. It does not make sense to constrain them by requiring the windows platform to run.
Balmer was jumping across the stage yelling Developers, Developers, Developers! Now someone in Redmond is executing and pushing the applications and tools platforms. It will be interesting to see where this leaves Windows in the medium term.
Well, even though he was completely lambasted and lampooned by "Developers Developers Developers", he wasn't wrong.
We see the 85%/15% split in programming and developing as well. When something is just too good to pass up, a lot of us switch over and start working on the next hotness. Sometimes, those things switch and become the embedded tech you have to learn to get in there. Arduino is one such thing. As is C, and Linux. For DB's, it used to be MySQL, and now PostgreSQL, and large heapings of good/bad for MongoDB and Redis.
Where MS lost for a long time, was the insane amount of bad will towards protocol obfuscation, protocol "extensions" that break IETF protocols, and of course the monopolist behaviors that they were found guilty for.
The problem is they ran away people who'd develop for their platform, and make crazy awesome things. Can't say I blame them. I'm one who ran, and really haven't looked back. And recently, we had a "party" at work, because I was able to wipe the last 2 windows boxes we had. To Linux.
Active directory is not a separate product like the others it is very much a core part of Windows Server. Unless you think AAA parts of an OS are a separate product from the OS, AD is very much tied to Windows.
You could turn AD into just another identity management platform, but you would pretty much lose everything that makes AD awesome. AD is impressive because it is so integral and closely tied to Windows. It begins to lose its lustre when you integrate other platforms because when you lose that close coupling, there's nothing but a distributed user authentication store.
I'm not sure what else you want from a directory server but a "distributed user authentication store." Maybe you're referring to file and print services? Email server integration? All of these kinds of things should be available, regardless of what platform the directory server is running on.
I'd make some long argument about the Linux market longing for an easy-to-use directory server, but I see that Novell Directory Services still lives on as NetIQ, and I've never heard of anyone using it, so maybe the market just isn't there. (Another victim of Microsoft's monopoly.) So maybe it doesn't matter that AD isn't platform independent. I guess companies running a lot of Linux are happy to hassle with the nightmare that is OpenLDAP.
The various open source solutions that Oracle EOL'd which are now offered by ForgeRock have seemed to be decent alternatives in this space, but of course they are now making the source less accessible:
> Active directory is not a separate product like the others it is very much a core part of Windows Server. Unless you think AAA parts of an OS are a separate product from the OS, AD is very much tied to Windows.
Which is aggravating when you want to setup a test environment.
Balmer was jumping across the stage yelling Developers, Developers, Developers! Now someone in Redmond is executing and pushing the applications and tools platforms. It will be interesting to see where this leaves Windows in the medium term.