It all started with Novell Netware. It was a great product and companies would buy it to have centralized management. Microsoft noticed this and decided to use their power position to drive Novell out of the market by offering a similar service and have it built in in their server product line. Novell tried to fight but it didn't last long.
The protocol was proprietary and an open source implementation in Samba was very slow at catching up. If you decided to host a domain controller using it, you newer knew if a random disconnect was a network issue or the controller or the client.
And here we are. Active directory, or Entra or however they call it these days, is basically a standard way to manage users everywhere. And until a strong entity (EU?) comes up with strong backup towards an alternative solutions (we have plenty of them now), the situation will not change.
> Active directory, or Entra or however they call it these days, is basically a standard way to manage users everywhere. And until a strong entity (EU?) comes up with strong backup towards an alternative solutions (we have plenty of them now), the situation will not change.
You still have Active Directory on premise and now you have EntraID (formerly Azure AD) in the Azure cloud.
For Windows devices, it is the only mechanism supported to have a centralized management system.
For other systems, such as MacOS, you have alternatives that don't require any centralized user database.
Most cloud-native companies today rely on Okta or Amazon Cognito for their applications. Google Workspace supports this too, but it is incredibly basic at what it can do.
I don't think there's nothing that anyone can do to make this different.
And just to nitpick a little, it's like saying the smartphone reduced the camera market because of its dominant position. It didn't, it just provided convenience when there was none (a phone, a camera, a video recorder...).
The protocol was proprietary and an open source implementation in Samba was very slow at catching up. If you decided to host a domain controller using it, you newer knew if a random disconnect was a network issue or the controller or the client.
And here we are. Active directory, or Entra or however they call it these days, is basically a standard way to manage users everywhere. And until a strong entity (EU?) comes up with strong backup towards an alternative solutions (we have plenty of them now), the situation will not change.