re: PowerShell Not Your Father's Command Line Part 23 of 31: HUGE Announcements, Disagreements, Best Practices and A Party…Oh My!

Peter — Tue, 24 May 2011 10:27:20 GMT

I think the focus on PowerShell highlights the fact that Microsoft's product development has become geared almost entirely towards large enterprises. A small company with 1-5 servers has pretty much no use for PowerShell or lots of other things Microsoft is pushing. Microsoft gives us examples of using PowerShell like "I can write a script that lets me create 100 new users in a few seconds based on an Excel file I get from HR." That's great, but only the largest of organizations would be adding 100 users on a regular basis. At a small company I would get a handwritten note from someone saying "This [single] person is starting on Monday, please set up an account for them." They also say I can use PowerShell to do things like script the rollout of web servers so my entire clustered web farm is identical. At small company, I would have a single web server so I really have no use for that functionality.

When Exchange 2010 came out, one of the things Microsoft pushed very hard as a great new feature was the discovery and legal hold features. Only the largest of companies are getting sued so often that those features are really useful. Most small and medium companies don't even have a "compliance officer" or see lawsuits often enough to care about features like that.

It feels to me like Microsoft is designing products and features THEY need to run their business and then trying to market them to everyone else, when only a very small number of companies are of the same scale as Microsoft and have similar business problems. Most companies are not running highly redundant, geographically distributed data centers. The small companies I have worked at run a single SBS server, or maybe up to 5 individual servers. They have no redundancy, no high availability, no clustering, no product specific administrators, no change control processes and no automated user or machine provisioning, and no need for the products that support these technologies.

Even a product like Intune which is supposed to be geared towards smaller organizations misses the mark by including upgrade rights to Windows 7 in the price. Upgrading a desktop OS is something only large companies do. Small companies do not upgrade their operating systems, they get a new OS when they buy new hardware. Microsoft should remove that benefit from Intune and lower the price, which would make it a much more attractive product to small companies.

PowerShell is part of Microsoft's idea that organizations should strive to make their IT organizations (what they call) "dynamic". However, only the largest of organizations would realistically strive to reach that. Smaller organizations would never dedicate the resources to create an IT system that can allow department heads to request and deploy servers automatically and dynamically distribute computing power depending on seasonal demand. These things happen so infrequently in small companies that it would be a waste of time to even try to become a "dynamic" IT organization. Spending time learning PowerShell and writing scripts to automate something that has to be done once a year is generally a waste, no matter how monotonous the once a year task.

It would be great if Microsoft would focus more on the needs of smaller organizations because there are far, far more of them out there than the huge global organizations they seem to be currently focused on.