It’s fucking wild to me that anyone ever convinced anyone in enterprise to shift to cloud and SaaS offerings in the first place.
You really thought it would be cheaper forever to give all your IT to someone else? You didn’t think you were getting captured?
You thought it was a good idea to store all your data on someone else’s servers, who have control over access to your information and, in most cases, can probably read it? And that if they raised prices or did something you didn’t like such as analysis or AI training on it, you weren’t completely held hostage by this?
It didn’t set off alarm bells that all the SaaS stuff seemed less featureful and more buggy?
That every workstation was now a recurring subscription?
That you now have to pay extra to get different software to interact with each other?
You thought there would never be any downtime? You thought if there was that you would make up the cost by contractual discounts?
It’s a good goddamn thing that I didn’t know how fucking stupid adults were when I was a kid or I’d have been scared for my fucking life for so many more years.
It was very odd at my company. We were a Google Workspace company. Gmail, Meet, Drive, etc with our own servers for messaging, gitlab and some other things.
Sure being Google based isn’t great either, but generally people were fine with it. Then the C suite said we were moving to Microsoft. Lots and lots of complaining, asking for justification, but no reason was given (not even cost). Today people are still cursing teams 18months later. We’re not in control of our own data (things get deleted every time somebody leaves, and permissions are generally a mess).
No one ever gets fired for buying IBM or Microsoft. I remember years ago I put together a plan for all opensourced, mature software on Linux hosts for my company. Would have saved us 6 figures in coats. They went with microsoft’s crappy solution instead because it was Microsoft.
I mean, they are probably running RedHat or Debian on their servers anyway, so if it’s reliable enough for them, then it’s reliable enough for clients.
And it doesn’t help that actually running your own working mail server in 2026 is a fucking ball-ache. Especially if you don’t want every big provider to mark all your mail as spam. Email has been captured by big tech.
Even people who self host a lot of stuff usually don’t bother with it.
It’s fucking wild to me that anyone ever convinced anyone in enterprise to shift to cloud and SaaS offerings in the first place.
You really thought it would be cheaper forever to give all your IT to someone else? You didn’t think you were getting captured?
You thought it was a good idea to store all your data on someone else’s servers, who have control over access to your information and, in most cases, can probably read it? And that if they raised prices or did something you didn’t like such as analysis or AI training on it, you weren’t completely held hostage by this?
It didn’t set off alarm bells that all the SaaS stuff seemed less featureful and more buggy?
That every workstation was now a recurring subscription?
That you now have to pay extra to get different software to interact with each other?
You thought there would never be any downtime? You thought if there was that you would make up the cost by contractual discounts?
It’s a good goddamn thing that I didn’t know how fucking stupid adults were when I was a kid or I’d have been scared for my fucking life for so many more years.
It was very odd at my company. We were a Google Workspace company. Gmail, Meet, Drive, etc with our own servers for messaging, gitlab and some other things.
Sure being Google based isn’t great either, but generally people were fine with it. Then the C suite said we were moving to Microsoft. Lots and lots of complaining, asking for justification, but no reason was given (not even cost). Today people are still cursing teams 18months later. We’re not in control of our own data (things get deleted every time somebody leaves, and permissions are generally a mess).
They wanted somebody else to be ultimately liable for problems, not themselves.
They wanted less headcount, especially amongst employees that are more intelligent than they are.
They wanted to handle things via gladhandling and ‘business negotiations’, not actual strategy snd design.
No one ever gets fired for buying IBM or Microsoft. I remember years ago I put together a plan for all opensourced, mature software on Linux hosts for my company. Would have saved us 6 figures in coats. They went with microsoft’s crappy solution instead because it was Microsoft.
What was your Boss’ feedback? Why didn’t he/she like your recommendation? I’m going to guess a major constraint was too many sources for software.
Basically, if they went with IBM and it broke, its IBM’s fault
If they went open source and it broke, its our fault for picking it.
I mean, they are probably running RedHat or Debian on their servers anyway, so if it’s reliable enough for them, then it’s reliable enough for clients.
Liability for one’s product actually means something to IBM/Microsoft/etc. instead of some guy on github.
And it doesn’t help that actually running your own working mail server in 2026 is a fucking ball-ache. Especially if you don’t want every big provider to mark all your mail as spam. Email has been captured by big tech.
Even people who self host a lot of stuff usually don’t bother with it.
For me it’s the security side of self-hosting anything connected to the internet. Keeping on top of all the security updates is a chore.