I'm not sure they've really changed, but I judge them from an enterprise viewpoint. I think their strategy has certainly changed, but I think their core ideals have remained the same, and I think they are really just honing in on their primary market.
Their tech still doesn't play well with others, only in the areas where they absolutely have to.
I think Sharepoint in the cloud is a good example. It's really great if you let it handle most things, maybe you buy a theme or maybe something bigger to put on top, but generally you let Sharepoint handle most things on your intranet. You'll include a few non-Microsoft systems through Sharepoint apps or widgets, and that still works well enough. That's the great use case. The terrible use case, is using it alongside 500 other IT systems and trying to include those, the way you'd like a modern enterprise intranet to do.
We have a system to report our driving to get it refunded. Another system to get vacation time accepted and validated, and a third system for sick leave. All with their own web-interfaces, mobile apps and open APIs. They rely on AD and ADFS for authentication, but they're their own things. Sure you can build a Sharepoint specific plugin for each of them, but a modern intranet should really support stuff like VUE stand alone widgets/apps so that you can share those widgets between systems and you really can't do that with a Sharepoint plugin.
We use Azure a lot, like I said, and it I think it's great, but it's very clear that .NET is very first class in Azure. You can argue that stuff like Node.js is up there, and maybe the few python frameworks that Microsoft support with visual studio, but JAVA, Go, Flutter or whatever you can think of certainly isn't smooth in Azure.
And just try using non-outlook, libra office or something other than one drive for business in your Microsoft enterprise setup, you can, but it's not very nice.
I'm sounding negative, but I actually really like Microsoft. I think they're great at what they do, and I think they're one of the best partners you can have in enterprise, along as you embrace their tech. But that's the catch, and that's why I think they haven't really changed their core values. I do think it's perfectly reasonable, for them to want you to use their technologies, from a business point of view, but when I look at the options for stuff like cloud, I think it's very clear that Azure wants you to also build your backbone in .NET with maybe Node.js + a JS framework on the front, where as with AWS I feel like Amazon doesn't really care what your stack is.
Their tech still doesn't play well with others, only in the areas where they absolutely have to.
I think Sharepoint in the cloud is a good example. It's really great if you let it handle most things, maybe you buy a theme or maybe something bigger to put on top, but generally you let Sharepoint handle most things on your intranet. You'll include a few non-Microsoft systems through Sharepoint apps or widgets, and that still works well enough. That's the great use case. The terrible use case, is using it alongside 500 other IT systems and trying to include those, the way you'd like a modern enterprise intranet to do.
We have a system to report our driving to get it refunded. Another system to get vacation time accepted and validated, and a third system for sick leave. All with their own web-interfaces, mobile apps and open APIs. They rely on AD and ADFS for authentication, but they're their own things. Sure you can build a Sharepoint specific plugin for each of them, but a modern intranet should really support stuff like VUE stand alone widgets/apps so that you can share those widgets between systems and you really can't do that with a Sharepoint plugin.
We use Azure a lot, like I said, and it I think it's great, but it's very clear that .NET is very first class in Azure. You can argue that stuff like Node.js is up there, and maybe the few python frameworks that Microsoft support with visual studio, but JAVA, Go, Flutter or whatever you can think of certainly isn't smooth in Azure.
And just try using non-outlook, libra office or something other than one drive for business in your Microsoft enterprise setup, you can, but it's not very nice.
I'm sounding negative, but I actually really like Microsoft. I think they're great at what they do, and I think they're one of the best partners you can have in enterprise, along as you embrace their tech. But that's the catch, and that's why I think they haven't really changed their core values. I do think it's perfectly reasonable, for them to want you to use their technologies, from a business point of view, but when I look at the options for stuff like cloud, I think it's very clear that Azure wants you to also build your backbone in .NET with maybe Node.js + a JS framework on the front, where as with AWS I feel like Amazon doesn't really care what your stack is.