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.

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.

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

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

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?