I'd say somewhat fine depending on the title, they broke a lot of backward compatibility recently
> You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I'd also say that's where they won, because it looks like an attractive option for the executive and people in power who can purchase these.
As if you're asking me, sure it's cheaper but these MS products are nowhere near as good as any of the alternatives you listed and you'd have to factor the productivity loss.
It's kind of a cheap all-in buffet, sure it's cheap but quality isn't there.
Part of the revisionist history these days is making IBM out the be hero that was crushed by Microsoft but nothing could be further from the truth. IBM was the lumbering giant that evaluated developers by lines of code produced, had 14 levels of management, and wanted to protect their hardware interests more than anything. Microsoft hated working with them because they sucked. OS/2 was so buggy that the first patch was almost as big as the entire original install.
It has been a while since I read a book on NT kernel - "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft"
NT kernel was "supposed" to run OS/2 apps and Windows apps. But the NT kernel is of MS making, NOT IBM.
The connection to VAX/VMS is due to MS hiring Dave Cutler, who worked there before.
NT was entirely a Microsoft project. They hired the prism team from DEC and started completely from scratch.
Mach and microkernels were hot at one point despite having many issues with performance.