Big tech is here to let us down

In the age of AI there's ZERO reason for "the global North" to continue using Microsoft. Wean your finance guys off of Excel, somehow. Replace the CTO with somebody that can hire IT that doesn't depend on the crutches of Microsoft.

If people's MS subscription revenue were funneled into on-site devs and devops for open source solutions, we'd all live in a better world. Sure, the money wouldn't be funneled to a single ledger in Redmond, but the overall productivity would be higher and there'd be greater GDP growth in other areas.

I've heard of so many small companies with a slightly technical bent replacing their SalesForce with better CRMs that make everyone happier, thanks to AI. MS is next.

Let's make sure that dollars get funneled away from economic rent and into more productive efforts. Schumpeterian rents might exist for a bit, but they should never exist long. Microsoft's rents have lasted for too long to be economically optimal.

Trust in others, across the board, is tanking. I expect in the not to distant future every company will have a completely proprietary stack, or they will be facing competition circling them while they can't keep their shit running. It is the mono culture that is too easily attacked.

> Now, are Microsoft going to offer any compensation for either lost business or additional accrued costs? I highly doubt it, even though it is literally their fault and they do still have the cash reserves, despite increasingly wasting it on loss-making AI adventures.

Aren't they? I know that they, and other big techs, have clauses in their terms that say if they don't meet service requirements they will offer refunds/credits. I've never been in a position where I was the one requesting the refund but I always presumed they actually did it.

I feel this is missing the role we play. Choosing free, flashy, new and jumping on the new best thing in droves.

Unfortunately the most effective way to learn about what is important is to have it taken away. So I don't believe this is going to change ... ever.

Some of us software engineers have been predicting the software apocalypse since over a decade so what's going on now is not surprising.

What else won't surprise me is the government trying to step in and making it their problem. That's what I'm worried about. The only right thing to do is remove regulations, remove government intervention from every aspect of the economy, and let the market fix the mess which the central planners have created.

Designing the entire software industry as a giant government-supported oligopoly was not a good idea. It was unethical and it was not going to work in the long term.

backup plans should be discussed (both backing up the data and alternative services to use when services go down), and also switching to better alternatives to Microsoft when possible

Hot take: most people, in most industries, should be able to tolerate a day of downtime in the sense that there are still useful, productive things to do even when all the computers die.

The fact that the world relies on four 9's of availability and throws a hissy fit whenever there are outages is an antipattern.

And also, people should get a snow day every once in a while.

It’s interesting I have been 0% affected by this big outage at home or work

Big tech isn't here to let anyone down, it is your company executives and administrators who are here to let you down.

I have never understood why companies chose to standardize on Microsoft everything then switch the businesses to Microsoft Cloud everything in the belief that it was cheaper and better, simply because they don't want to pay money for onsite administrators or local IT guys for their IT. I mean if you want to use Microsoft Office then by regular licenses and run them on premises, but everything in the cloud who thought of that?

Many employees also don't know that their bosses or bosses bosses were also given kickbacks to switch their IT to Microsoft/Google/Oracle centralized services. For some obscure reason company bosses and government institutions still switch to Oracle for their services which don't work, wind up with Oracle negotiating with them for money for services which don't work, then they pay termination fees to Oracle if they bail out early.

Another factor I believe to be at work here is large investment firms like Blackrock, State Street etc pressuring the executives of companies which they are major shareholders in to switch their IT to the IT companies they are major shareholders in, therefore boosting the values of their stocks. For me it is the main reason for this centralization of IT services into Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

As someone who started using AWS from the time it went beta, I could see the value in it, but I couldn't see why companies had to switch their systems wholesale to it. I could see the benefits for new startups which had to move quickly and early and perhaps have a need for unexpected traffic, but even after some time the stuff would have to move back onsite once things settled down.

Other the end of the day the situation is entirely down to greed and corruption masking as incompetence.

A week or 2 ago in the UK virtually all the major banks went down due to some problems at Google, Microsoft or one of the other companies. So many banks had their IT hosted with them so everything went down simultaneously.

It is time the governments passed legislation forcing these banks not to centralize their IT with these companies and ensure they have their own independent redundant systems. Maybe they should go back to IBM mainframes or something.

Many EU countries started moving away.. and then failed to do so and doubled down on Microsoft again.

Blaming every downtime on "vibecoding, probably" is so weird and lazy. As if these places never had downtime previously

https://omarchy.org is the Windows killer. https://omasheet.org the Excel poison.

> how indebted the Global North has become to Microsoft and its enshittified services

I wish it’d be only global north boomers but India and much of South East Asia also runs on freaking M$ and not unlikely that excel is big in China too.

I'm probably going to get a lot of flak here, but if the damages are that all emails have to wait for a day twice in a year, then that's quite a good product.

While we can engineer a system with better availability, seems the market is quite ok with one or two nines for this.

So the trick would be not to make anything truly critical depend on such a service. And no, payroll is not enough, I'm talking OT.

> Now, are Microsoft going to offer any compensation for either lost business or additional accrued costs?

The NSA lost control of EternalBlue which resulted in billions of dollars of economic damage globally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue

They didn't offer any compensation either.

Holy cow another Sweeting! I wonder if we are related?

Edit: and you've spent time in Shanghai too! Small world!

Feels like we are entering the fall of this crop of mega corps. Between Apple’s absolutely garbage software, Microsoft’s complete incompetence, and Meta’s endless lawsuits… finally time for a little creative destruction?

When your necessary compute is controlled by rentier capitalists, and you’ve had the option to switch to compute not controlled by rentier capitalists for years, who do you really have to blame but yourself?

I’ve been enjoying a piping hot cup of “I told you so” every morning this week, it feels like.

“Microsoft is too big to go down, why do we need a redundancy?” Another round, barkeep.

“Amazon won’t ever have downtime, they’re huge! Our workloads are much safer there.” Make that two, what with MEC1-AZ2 being a smoking hole.

“Why would we need backups when these providers offer us a five-nines SLA?” Sorry, make that three, since Google’s EU-WEST-2-B AZ lost power and its redundancies failed to start.

Now don’t get me wrong, nothing is perfect or bulletproof. That being said, the more eggs you put into a single basket, the more of them get damaged if something happens to said basket.

Everyone lost the plot on backups, redundancy, and diversification in favor of single, “do it all” providers and hyperscalers.

What could possibly go wrong?