This. This is the nuanced intelligent discussion points we need to be talking about. Thanks for writing all this up.
It’s infuriating, but in the end, business tends to feed into and be run by other business. Microsoft is business. Their software is business.
Business is a slow lumbering behemoth that does funny things like base mission-critical operations on a Windows95 machine because decades ago they committed to the tar-pit of a now-dead vendor, and nothing else can read those files. (I’m told this happens in science fields all the time)
I mean hey, OS/2 and COBOL are still in use, connected to faded beige hardware using parallel ports. In 2024. People don’t understand how change-averse businesses are! Lol
We’re also up against particularly targeted campaigns from tech giants since the beginning, to put their proprietary software in schools and taught in universities to eventually cement themselves in perpetuity, no matter how crappy they get, as “industry standard.”
Thankfully Linux is really big in server world already, but I hope in the future more organizations will be able to take more control over their own infrastructure. I understand why it’s not feasible to “just switch” yet.