Most "large" companies prefer WISA over LAMP? Why?

Question

If this is true, I'd like to know why. Do we see a great percentage of secure and high traffic web applications built in LAMP?

Answer 1

Generally, because MS sells to them, and MS provides support. When you have a major flaw, the ability to call the manufacturer is worth the cost of the product (in the eyes of the business).

Answer 2

"Nobody gets fired for buying IBM". That kind of sums up the choice of a lot of execs. Nobody is going to get fired for trusting a huge company that has a proven record of success -- even if it's not the best choice.

Answer 3

From my experience, large corporations don't seem to "trust" open source software. Even though open source software is in many cases more secure than closed software.

Answer 4

It's largely because once a company gets to a certain size, it's not the people with the technical knowledge who make the platform decisions.

Ineconomies of scale?

Answer 5

Many prefer the security of another large company to go to with support issues. That being said there are many successful and high-traffic sites built on LAMP.

Answer 6

It's all about support. A large company buying from Microsoft will get a hotline through to their support team. Because any downtime could be incredibly expensive to a large company, the ability to get immediate support at any time is more valuable than any savings made on the initial purchase.

Also, if it all goes wrong, there's someone there to blame and potentially sue ;)

Answer 7

Probably because WISA is backed by support and official patches and upgrades, no matter how far apart they may be. Plus WISA has a great development environment. And you don't have to read a ton of text files to figure out how to administer something. Also it is easier to pick from say 8 server OS options than the seemingly infinite free ones.

Answer 8

"Niche" and/or Emergent Technologies are very hard to get additional wet-ware for.

By hard I mean the wet-ware has a long lead time, is expensive and generally un-referencable.

New Tech or OpenSource may be the obvious choice but, if implemented, too often exists in the mind of one or two resources who are a flight risk if they feel under apreciated.

J/.

Answer 9

You won't get fired for betting the company on Microsft.

Once you've got a team of Win Server Admins / .NET developers / underqualified monkeys it's easier to stick with what you know.

and you're ASP.NET devs are also winforms devs and MS Office 'platform' devs.

But that only applies to internal apps of course. For public stuff, I think LAMP will always have the edge. And a lot of people who build internal apps on WISA also run LAMP/WAMP and/or J2EE anyway, for bought in apps.

Answer 10

I believe it has more to do with the sense of security that a big company gives you than with support. The business model of most open-source companies relies on providing support and services, instead of charging you for software licenses. So, maybe, the support is not the main issue there.

Also, there is the matter of visibility. When we go out of the computer science world, open-source loses most of its visibility. It has a completely different meaning to us than it has to our family, friends and generally non-computer-geek people. They will go "Windows, of course I know Microsoft Windows... Linux...hum.. yeah. I've heard about that. It's free, right? What's the catch?"

Answer 11

I think it's the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" factor. If a company wants a Linux/UNIX system with support they have plenty of options. There's Redhat, Novell, Sun, and Canonical that all provide support for their systems. That and it tends to be easier to find Windows programmers and administrators.

Answer 12

I am wondering, though, in these tougher economic times if we begin to see more large companies embracing open-source "LAMP" and other such derivatives.. Makes me wonder if I need to, as well.

Answer 13

Another part to it can be what did the first web developers start using at the company. If the company was started by former Microsoft employees or the heads of technology used to work at Microsoft, then I think you could expect them to use the Microsoft Employee store to get copies of some of the software to build the web site. At least, that is why I got into Visual Studio development after university for a dot-com.

Answer 14

Wikipedia and Facebook both run LAMP stacks. Wikipedia may not be large in terms of profit, but they have tons of users and content. I think Facebook is large by any definition. The difference is they're not "enterprisey", which is what I think you really mean by "large". "Enterprisey" companies are defined by spending more money than is necessary on things they don't need that don't work well, usually accompanied with/caused by a terrible bureaucracy. Other responses have detailed the plague of such corporations, so I won't go into it further; I just wanted to point out some of the successful uses of LAMP.