So Microsoft is preventing you from buying copy of Windows 7 and installing Firefox? No? Your anger is misplaced then, should be angry with your IT department that doesn't let you upgrade form a 9 year old OS.
An MS-based "Enterprise IT" is more than that, much more. It's not about the Windows client version and choice of browser. They'll have heavily integrated server products (all of them, multiple instances), sometimes for good reason and sometimes not. SQL Server, ISA, "Office Communication Server", "Team Foundation Server", SharePoint Server, Active Directory Services, etc. pp. you name it, ad infinitum. All with the appropriate, sometimes buggy GUI tools, and the much-needed, sometimes buggy, 3rd-party add-ons and tools. Often this ends up as a big mess, and while the products have certainly matured over a decade and thousands of developers working on them, a decade and 1000s of devs can also introduce many new flaws with each update. In the end, it's a big pile of mediocrity and un-agility, and yes, despite that "deciders" often buy into it because-nobody-ever-got-fired-for-etc. Of course, this will not go on forever...
Care to give us a concrete example? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point here, but my experience has been somewhat the opposite. The tight integration of the Microsoft development tools (for example Visual Studio, SQL Server) is what makes it such an appealing and easy to use development platform for so many enterprise developers.
> a decade and 1000s of devs can also introduce many new flaws with each update.
I find that silly - what are you basing that argument on other than anecdotal evidence? Using that same logic you'd expect linux to be extremely flawed since so many developer's hands touch it.
Sure, the integration of dev tools is pretty slick and appealing. But I wasn't talking about VS at all, but about all the various servers and how they are typically deployed in the Enterprise.
You're right about the "anecdotal evidence", but I just experience that anecdotal evidence every other day and there's a lot more of that anecdotal evidence to be found in most IT depts and MS shops.
