Introduction
For many decades we have been strictly Microsoft evangelist (where Microsoft had solutions that matched requirements), We became particularly excited when Microsoft announced Windows 10 mobile and Nokia designed mobile devices. Mobile we saw as a positive direction to encompass all our server and desktop efforts with mobile support. We put three years development effort into this direction and Microsoft continued to make positive statements and promised features that gave us confidence to expense time and effort. Customers started purchasing Microsoft phones. The almost overnight, suppliers did not have stock and Microsoft started to drop support for models that where under 12 months old and finally they announced that they have stopped all mobile development.
This week we learnt that Windows Server 2019 Essentials may be the last version aimed as the huge small business sector. Many small businesses still prefer or can only use an on-premise server. We see an absolute need for small business servers and are concerned that once again Microsoft will kill more on-premise offerings.
Moving dependancy away from Microsoft
At first we could not see a path to reduce our dependency away from Microsoft products. But Microsoft basically force all those customers who believed that Microsoft had committed to Windows Mobile (the abandoned product) when they dropped the product, for us three years of development was lost. Now all these customers had to look at devices that where not Windows 10 based. Meantime those like us who had only just replaced all our mobile devices with Windows 10 mobiles started to experience what happens when the Manufacturer stops maintaining a product and OS, no security updates or fixes for several years now.
We are now replacing all mobile devices and helping other clients to migrate away from Microsoft to reduce risk.
As a Microsoft Partner for many years we lost confidence that Microsoft had any interest for small business that depend on products like Windows server essentials and that concern was confirmed recently with news that Windows Server 2019 Essentials may be the last version to support on-premise customers. This excludes many existing customers from an affordable system for their business.
Our task now it to evaluate a smooth non-Microsoft solution that will not introduce uncertainty or risk.
We have moved development away from Microsoft products like SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint and Office applications.
With Windows 10 we have equally been disappointed with frequent reliability and performance issues that the end user experiences almost on a daily basis and the deploy before test update process is in our view a very bad choice by the company.
By the end of November this year we would have decommissioned all Microsoft mobiles and Microsoft mobile apps like Outlook, Skype and Office.
In development we are slowly dropping Windows development and certainly modern app development for the platform.
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