Hal Berenson, a former Microsoft general manager, writes about Microsoft strategy, SQL Server, WinFS, and the company's business decisions.
HN commenters recommend it for understanding Microsoft, praising his insider view and posts such as the aQuantive mistake and Windows 8.
I'm pretty sure I wrote about the history of the Enterprise vs. Standard decision making on my blog (http://hal2020.com) but I can't find the post right now. I'm one of the people responsible for the original philosophy, and I don't think it's changed much. I'll go back and look for it again.
Basically you have three dynamics going on. The reality check of course is that the competition is Oracle and IBM DB2, and to a lesser extent open source databases, and various analytics products. Check out Oracle's price list and SQL Server Enterprise remains inexpensive. And Microsoft has introduced cheaper options to keep "free" open source options somewhat at bay, though the truth is that without multiplatform support there is nothing they can do to really capture that segment of the market.
Standard Edition exists because I couldn't convince my then boss that we should bifurcate it into a couple of sensible products, one slightly lower in capability and one slightly higher. The slightly higher one would have been a "Small Business Enterprise" edition that included many of the features of Enterprise but somehow retained differentiation from full Enterprise and would have been dramatically less expensive. I had a differentiation, but I don't recall what it was. The reason the bifurcation was rejected was that Standard was the edition that matched earlier versions and we didn't want to piss off customers by forcing them into a more expensive or less functional edition. And…
PS is just a piece of the puzzle. In fact, if I were to automate things on Windows, I would pick perl/python/ruby(on linux, I use shell scripts only for jobs which are less than 50 lines).
The major question is does the objects which are to be automated lend themselves to automation?
Here is one of the results I found while looking for 'sql server automate'
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187061.aspx
If I were talking about MySQL/PostgreSQL, they lend themselves very well to automating. The shell script just calls the relevant programs.
Likewise, if I am automating nginx, shell is just the glue. nginx provides the nut and bolts, and scripting is the wrench.
Unless IIS, SQl server et al. provide similar facilities, powershell isn't going to help.
I haven't used SQL server in a long, long time. My doubts were from some articles I have read:
http://hal2020.com/2011/07/27/porting-microsoft-sql-server-to-linux/
nix DBA’s used shell scripts as their primary management tool, but the SQL Server of that day was not scriptable. Would those DBA’s accept the use of GUI tools?
So it looks like it used to be the case that it wasn't scriptable, but it is now.
That's an unreasonably high estimate, and there is some data to support the idea that it's unreasonable[1].
Microsoft has been losing, at most, a few billion[2] a year on Bing. Assuming they've spent $45B since 2009, that's $6.4B per year spent on Bing. A net loss of $2B on Bing would mean Microsoft is making $4.4B per year, which isn't in the ballpark.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-online-operating-income-2012-10
2. http://hal2020.com/2013/01/18/about-that-2b-annual-loss-from-microsofts-search-business/
hal berenson is super smart and I think says it best in his reply to your comment[1].
microsoft, just like google and apple and redhat and linkedin and facebook, is a company - it is there to make money for shareholders. what they do to make money and how they do it can be very different and cause disagreements. but I think people don't always think of that when considering tech endeavors, particularly when there is any entry in a market that is free.
[1] http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/#comment-15007
This has nothing to do with Microsoft.
Due to anti-trust law, Microsoft can't have any influence over decisions Nokia makes before the acquisition[1]. Even if Microsoft hated the idea of Nokia building and Android phone (likely) it could do nothing about it. And, even more importantly, Nokia could NOT change its plans even if Microsoft wanted them to.
[1] http://hal2020.com/2013/10/16/how-much-influence-is-microsoft-having-on-nokia-right-now/
There is a series of blog posts that gives a retrospective on WinFS:
* https://hal2020.com/2013/02/14/winfs-integratedunified-storage-and-microsoft-part-1/
* https://hal2020.com/2013/02/14/winfs-integratedunified-storage-and-microsoft-part-2/
* https://hal2020.com/2013/02/25/winfs-integratedunified-storage-and-microsoft-part-3/
* https://hal2020.com/2013/03/10/winfs-integratedunified-storage-and-microsoft-part-4/