A lot of the MS technology stack makes sense in a world when you have a lot of individual servers scattered across companies. But speaking as a guy who still maintains a couple of physical servers of my own, I think that's dying. Ubiquitous good bandwidth means centrally managed services make much more sense.
I'd hate to discourage anybody from doing technical work, but about the last thing I'd recommend a student become today is an MS sysadmin. I think its career prospects are similar to COBOL developer: reasonable for people to keep going until they retire, but definitely not a growth industry with 40 years of solid prospects ahead.
Hello from Cape Town, South Africa where one of the planets most innovative mobile service providers runs once of the biggest and most important organisations in the country and does it all on physical servers.
I'm talking about Vodacom and as a denizen of the third world it really gets up my nose when people make wild claims based on the ubiquity and quality of their broadband as to the future of technology in the world at large... emerging markets, much?
I get your point, but I'm talking about a multi-decade time horizon. My impression is that emerging markets are just lagging the first world, not permanently trapped in 1995.
Even if they were, I'm not sure my point's different: if Microsoft's major future market is only those parts of developing nations where bandwidth is unreliable, they're pretty much doomed. That's a niche business, and won't yield the kind of revenue that lets them sustain their hegemony.
I'm not sure I agree with you though that emerging markets are niche... I'm not an expert in economics but I suspect there may be a sense in which first worded is niche... Even more so in your several decade time horizon.
Oh, I don't think many poorly networked emerging markets will stay niche. But in going from emerging to emerged, they're going remain poorly connected niches.
If it makes you feel any better, I've been in plenty of first world homes that had no Internet options faster than 33.6 modem. No cell access, either. These claims are just as annoying here as they are in Capetown.
A lot of the MS technology stack makes sense in a world when you have a lot of individual servers scattered across companies. But speaking as a guy who still maintains a couple of physical servers of my own, I think that's dying. Ubiquitous good bandwidth means centrally managed services make much more sense.
I'd hate to discourage anybody from doing technical work, but about the last thing I'd recommend a student become today is an MS sysadmin. I think its career prospects are similar to COBOL developer: reasonable for people to keep going until they retire, but definitely not a growth industry with 40 years of solid prospects ahead.