I assume it’s a symptom of government IT generally not getting the funding it needs.
For a good while Microsoft was pretty much the only game in town that could give you the whole server OS, distributed identity (AD), email, and end user OS & productivity software as one big procurement and support contract—plus every other IT guy had MCSE certifications anyway so it was what they ended up selecting.
Once that was all set up in the 90s when governments were going hard on the IT bandwagon, I imagine the cost of migrating all of that to an alternative was seen as an unnecessary expense when governments could consider the US a stable ally.
I assume it’s a symptom of government IT generally not getting the funding it needs.
For a good while Microsoft was pretty much the only game in town that could give you the whole server OS, distributed identity (AD), email, and end user OS & productivity software as one big procurement and support contract—plus every other IT guy had MCSE certifications anyway so it was what they ended up selecting.
Once that was all set up in the 90s when governments were going hard on the IT bandwagon, I imagine the cost of migrating all of that to an alternative was seen as an unnecessary expense when governments could consider the US a stable ally.