Finally, it works well because "they made it" is not much of a criticism, in an environment where the rest of the OS/SW producers (excepting the perennial standards-setter: Sun -- not surprisingly for very similar reasons) are not interested in or willing to "make it". Groupware services, unified user authentication and access control, etc are implemented fairly seamlessly in Microsoft environments. OTOH, NFS has been around, what, 20+ years? And we are still screwing around with SYS_AUTH vs IPSec vs Kerberos?!
....................
Sigh.
There's a lot to chew on here but I'm going to focus on one statement in particular:
"Groupware services, unified user authentication and access control, etc are implemented fairly seamlessly in Microsoft environments. OTOH, NFS has been around, what, 20+ years? And we are still screwing around with SYS_AUTH vs IPSec vs Kerberos?!"
Prior to MSFT's ascendancy there was, in fact, a product which provided robust groupware, unified user authentication and ACLs, all bundled in a reliable package: Novell Netware.
Early implementations of MSFT's active directory (previously known as Windows Server domain) were roughly constructed mirrors of Novell's architecture (indeed, in NT 4.0 server tests - part of the now undervalued MCSE track - there was a not-so-subtle fixation on Netware comparisons evident in many of the exam questions).
As a fresh scrubbed youngster at UPenn, I built a Netware 3.12 server infrastructure which provided all the sorts of services MSFT would later claim to be 'innovations' in their domain/active directory product. I also built an NT 4.0 Server domain. Guess which platform stayed online the longest with the least amount of trouble? Yes, that's right, the one which loaded OS components as 'modules' which could be killed and restarted as required thereby eliminating - almost entirely - the need for system wide outages for maintenance (i.e., one shared service could be off lined while others carried on - an old technique MSFT was very slow to learn).
Although your points about NFS' shortcomings may be valid (well, are valid, actually), the heart of your argument - that MSFT has made things happen, brought services and methods together no one else has managed to successfully corral - is a misstatement of the industry's history.
Only relatively recently, with the arrival of Windows Server 2003, has MSFT managed to make their LDAP based directory system reasonably well behaved. And this isn't so much an achievement as a recapitulation of earlier accomplishments made by firms buried underneath MSFT's boot.
Finally...
I don't know your full professional history so what I'm about to write may be off base. If so, my apologies.
Ravi, my opinion of MSFT's products isn't based upon Linux fanboyism or what have you but long years of experience designing, deploying and troubleshooting almost every major offering from their product line in multinational enterprises with tens of thousands of users.
In other words, MSFT has earned my disrespect the hard way: by burning my ass, repeatedly and despite the best laid plans, time and again. This isn't to say that chaos and heartache must follow if you're a MSFT shop but the odds are not in your favor. Of course, this is true of all software which is, as Jaron Lanier puts it, "brittle".
But if you look a little deeper at the MSFT style of brittleness you'll find that a fair bit of it is caused by factors such as their "embrace and extend" tactics (look up the history of their implementations of SMB for a noteworthy example), marketing objectives and tunnel vision.
Now, from your tone and approach when it comes to MSFT I get the impression (and here's where I'm making assumptions about your resume) that outside of the family Dell running XP and other small implementations, you've had limited exposure to Redmond's product line and have spent your entire career as a UNIX adept.
If I'm right, you haven't experienced the dull pain of deploying the first iteration of Windows 2003 Server SP1 on a critical machine (at the urging of managers and against your better judgment) only to have it produce numerous bizarre errors that are first denied by MSFT and then later fixed with a service pack to correct the service pack.
And also, if I'm right, you haven't sat in meetings in which the slick MSFT salesman and his lovely accomplice convinced the CFO that Windows, running in a fail over clustered arrangement and linked to EMC boxes via fiber, was as robust as SOLARIS on Sun hardware, scaled as well and would serve your science staff designing new organisms or your trading floor performing billions of dollars of real time transactions just as efficiently.
When the inevitable happens - the server freezes, the reboots, the services (daemons) which refuse to start - just as you predicted at that fateful meeting, and you're staring at a server farm of over 1,000 Windows servers, trying to find a way to make them behave as MSFT falsely advertised you'll understand (as you probably already do) why I'm hesitant, almost to the point of refusal, to offer Redmond any kudos.
...
.d.