In this lesson we're going to be discussing a little bit about Windows in general. Now some of these facts you may not know but it goes into how large Windows environment actually is and how large Microsoft, in general, actually is. We're going to talk a little bit about why Microsoft or why Windows in the enterprise. We're going to discuss some key metrics surrounding windows and discuss what Windows is good at and why you may want to use Windows in an enterprise environment. Now this again covers the practical side of Windows and Windows Server more specifically. So I will try to, say Windows server, when I'm talking about Windows Server or Windows Desktop, so Windows 10, for example, that's the latest operating system if I'm talking about the desktop environment. Let's discuss Microsoft in general. Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Paul Allen and Bill Gates. As of today they have 114,000 employees. They also own major brands such as MSN, X-Box, Nokia, MSN, 343 Studios, Skype, Office 365, and actually many more. Those are just the ones that you probably recognize. 80% of Fortune 500 companies run on the Microsoft Cloud. Currently they are worth around $400 to $500 billion. So, a few interesting Microsoft facts. If you look at Outlook 2010 and you see the little silhouette of the little person that's meant for somebody's picture up in the upper left hand corner when you're typing a message, that's actually a silhouette of Bill Gates in his mug shot from being arrested several years ago when he was in college. The DirectX was actually originally named the Manhattan Project because, so, they say Microsoft wanted to destroy Japanese gaming industry. Microsoft included Solitaire in Windows originally back in the '90s to get people used to dragging and dropping with their mouse and it's still there today. Usually, you can, in some companies like to take those games off but, interesting fact about that, I actually had no idea up until a couple years ago that why they included those kind of games. The guy who snagged Windows 2000 happened to be named Bob. And Microsoft actually had rights to bob.com. So they actually made a deal where they switched the owners of those two. Kind of funny. In 1997 Microsoft also loaned or invested $150 million into Apple because they were failing as a company. Kind of interesting since Apple's the bigger of the two today. Windows by the numbers. 1985, Windows 1.0 came out. Their latest OS is Windows 10 for the desktop, Windows Server 2016 for the server edition. 400 million devices are currently running Windows 10 in some size, shape, or form. Now that could be phones, could be tablets, laptops, desktops, things like that. 192 countries run Microsoft Windows. Why learn about Windows? Well, enterprises run on Windows. The figure that I just announced a couple minutes ago really says about, you know, 80% of Fortune 500 companies run Windows in the cloud even. We didn't even have that option until a couple of years ago. It's amazing how much they've come along in the short amount of time. Here at the University we run roughly about 35% on Windows virtualization technology and the rest on, the 65%, on VMware technology. So what Windows does best? Microsoft Windows Server runs active directory. They run authentication services. They run DHCP, DNS. They run a lot of that stuff well. What they really excel at is user management, active directory more specifically. They run very well enterprise operating systems like Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10. Windows as a desktop OS, what they do well is the overall ease of management, the build process, anti-virus is baked in, use it for gaming, security features such as encryption, and a lot of other stuff that's baked in that makes Windows a true enterprise operating system. So, in conclusion, Windows is a robust technology and many enterprises use it for many different purposes. Here at UCCS, we run it for our user management. We run it for DHCP, DNS, file shares for example, security. We run it for a whole lot of different things and so do many other universities out there. Planning for a Windows environment, however, needs to have thought behind it. We just can't go install a Windows server and expect it to be managing all things and be all things to all people.
