The story of Microsoft's stack in a nutshell and why everyone is still so dependent on it. Migration is hard, and it only gets harder the longer you've built yourself on top of a particular technology.
Microsoft offered what basically amounted to "IT in a box." You got identity, email/groupware, an office suite, and an OS that ran on just about any IBM compatible PC and your own servers. You paid for the license, and then you controlled and hosted it after that. Microsoft was content to let you do whatever the hell you wanted with their software, and stuck to their promise to not break shit (backward compatibility for Win32).
That everything is now cloud hosted and stuffed with telemetry was a big rug pull, but it's not like everyone could just up and migrate to something else (and what else, for that matter, there's not much out there that matches). It was literally just this year that on-prem exchange support ended for the one-time purchase license, but even then on-prem is still available via subscription.
Microsoft gave every incentive in the world to get enterprises to stick with their stack, and it worked, so it's no wonder people are just now starting to panic a little and look for alternatives.
Microsoft offered what basically amounted to "IT in a box." You got identity, email/groupware, an office suite, and an OS that ran on just about any IBM compatible PC and your own servers. You paid for the license, and then you controlled and hosted it after that. Microsoft was content to let you do whatever the hell you wanted with their software, and stuck to their promise to not break shit (backward compatibility for Win32).
That everything is now cloud hosted and stuffed with telemetry was a big rug pull, but it's not like everyone could just up and migrate to something else (and what else, for that matter, there's not much out there that matches). It was literally just this year that on-prem exchange support ended for the one-time purchase license, but even then on-prem is still available via subscription.
Microsoft gave every incentive in the world to get enterprises to stick with their stack, and it worked, so it's no wonder people are just now starting to panic a little and look for alternatives.