[calewis]

I worked for a very old school manufacturing company based in Switzerland. We wanted to roll our own IoT platform for sensors in the factory. We spoke to MS, what they had was a load of garbage, so we decided to carry on as we were. I later found out that the MS CEO called the CEO of this company and from then on we were fighting every day as to why we weren’t using MS. This was a private company, not even a big spend, yet they got the CEO involved on sales calls? That’s when I realised how corrupt it was an org.

[dguest]

CERN (also in CH) made a half-effort to switch away from MS a few years ago. MS had started charging them a crazy amount of money. They got a few people working on it and even switched a few of the back end services. And actually the open source stuff worked amazingly well!

Then like a year later they doubled down on MS products (right after a new IT head came in). The IT people I spoke to had no idea why this happened but no one seemed to think going back to MS was a good idea.

Discussed more here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41717607

[ahartmetz]

When I was involved in high-energy physics (doing some pretty pedestrian software stuff), CERN switched from its beloved Hypernews system to something based on MS Sharepoint. Everybody was baffled about why they would do that and hated the new system.

It seems like Hypernews was only turned off in 2021, much much later than planned, but they did do it.

[anthk]

They even published Scientific Linux, a CentOS like RHEL fork.

[noisy_boy]

> We spoke to MS,

They are out to lock you in to ensure sustained cashflow, not solve your problem in the most impartial and cost efficient way for you.

[WillAdams]

Classic example of this was when Dell use WebObjects for their shop-front --- Microsoft was so put out that they threatened their licensing deals.

[speed_spread]

Small companies matter because the transition to non proprietary tech is potentially simpler and thus more likely to succeed. Add a few success stories from small players in the same market, making them more competitive might raise the attention of bigger players.

[sitkack]

This is absolutely the reason. This is why startups exist, new things are easier in small orgs for a variety of reasons.