5 ms·

It's starting to feel to me like modern day Microsoft has some kind of a Teflon coating. In the last month alone they've had their flagship cloud services down

by jsnell 3y ago

It's starting to feel to me like modern day Microsoft has some kind of a Teflon coating. In the last month alone they've had their flagship cloud services down for extended periods of time due to DDoS attacks, had their auth cookie signing keys compromised and abused at scale, and had a lawsuit reveal emails about how they were planning to use their cash at hand to buy all the content and destroy's Sony's gaming business. And none of it has any impact, nobody seems to care. The comments in this thread are crazy to me. Yes, dealing with targeted attacks by nation states is hard, and occasionally you'll fail. But that's part of the reason to pay Microsoft rather than try to host your own. In that situation the absolute minimum expectation is for MS to follow basic best practices. Nothing about this story suggests they've been doing that, it's just one wtf after another. And their communication on this has been so bad an unclear that it has to have been intentionally obfuscatory.

andromaton 3y ago
I used to consider their cloud products secure. When bings home page (plus i don't know how many tenants) was found incorrectly protected a few months ago i stopped. Google will discontinue your product or lock you out. Microsoft will let third parties in . We need better "office" platform vendors.
- lockhouse 3y ago
  Google Cloud if you want to live dangerously Azure if you're a .NET shop and want good integration with Visual Studio AWS for everyone else
  - bradleyjg 3y ago
    Azure’s salespeople are really good. In reality it’s azure if your cio insists.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Hilariously, Azure PaaS offerings of Microsoft products are notably worse than what is available in AWS. Examples: - SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) has no Azure PaaS, but there is an AWS PaaS for it. - RDS for SQL in AWS allows setting a time zone, Azure SQL Database is UTC only, breaking the majority of existing databases when migrated. (They confuse what "developers should do" with what "developers actually do".) - Azure's PaaS for Active Directory (Azure AD Domain Services) can only be linked to an Azure AD tenant, it can't be used as a standalone authoritative domain. AWS allows this scenario. Essentially, every Microsoft product you can think of is easier/cheaper/better on AWS instead of Azure. If Microsoft's CEO was still Bill Gates, heads would have rolled a long time ago.
    - Uvix 3y ago
      RDS for SQL Server does have some features missing from Azure SQL Database (SSAS and time zones as you said, but also SSRS). As a PaaS service it's pretty rough around the edges, though: scaling requires a long outage, copying a database between servers requires doing a backup to S3 and restoring from that, and the AWS backup/restore operates on the server level rather than the database level. Where AWS really showed its unsuitability to host applications on the Microsoft stack was that AWS doesn't have a PaaS way to host .NET Framework web applications; IaaS is the only option. So both .NET Framework web application nor Microsoft SQL Server database were noticeably harder on AWS than Azure for us. Standing up one IaaS server to host SSRS in Azure was a lot less work than accounting for all the gaps on the AWS side would have been.
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        Azure SQL database doesn’t support .BAK files. It can only import or export in BACPAC format which is SQL statements in a zip file and is an order of magnitude slower to restore. We’ve had issues where large databases would take forever to cut over to the PaaS database and cause long outages during migrations. It’s these random feature gaps that make these platforms difficult to deal with.
        Uvix 3y ago
        BACPACs are the only option to get a database out of Azure SQL. And yes, they do suck, for the reasons you outlined. For the initial migration to PaaS, whether Azure or AWS RDS, it’s faster and easier to use replication instead of BACPACs. For moves within the Azure SQL environment, they have database copy functionality that can be utilized. (Which RDS doesn’t have, and I would have sorely missed if we hadn’t pulled the plug on AWA.)
        jiggawatts 3y ago
        Replication is a breaking schema change, and incompatible with a long list of features and applications.
pwarner 3y ago
I get the sense the old MS is alive and well.
- blibble 3y ago
  did their reputation ever change from being a company that produces mostly bad quality unreliable software, that is only ever purchased by someone that wion't have to use it on a daily basis? Teams, Sharepoint, PowerBI, the ad platform that is Windows, Azure all terrible (not to mention the ruthless business practices)
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    did their reputation ever change from being a company that produces mostly bad quality unreliable software, that is only ever purchased by someone that wion't have to use it on a daily basis? Yes. Especially on HN. Microsoft used its video game systems and Linux flirtations as Trojan horses to convince a generation of tech-centric people that the bad old Microsoft of yore is just something that old people worry about and that today MS is all rainbows and unicorns. HN is full of people willing to fall in their swords for MS because they weren't around for its last round of despicable behavior, and bringing it up just means you're out of touch.
    - consumer451 3y ago
      VSCode seems like a biggie as well.
    - jodrellblank 3y ago
      Microsoft don't make tens of billions of dollars in revenue every quarter by "convincing people of rainbows and unicorns". Azure didn't pass $100Bn in annual revenue in 2022 by "Trojan horses". > "HN is full of people willing to fall in their swords for MS because they weren't around for its last round of despicable behavior" When was this last round? Is HN full of 20 year olds? Microsoft is really popular with the youth of today? That's nearly halfway back to when Microsoft was founded.
  - 3y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
FWIW, I have long asked such questions about MSFT. In the 1990s there was more open criticism of the company's practices. Not anymore. As suggested by the parent, "nobody seems to care." IMO, this sort of Teflon coating attitude has existed for many, many years. It seems that MSFT is above fault and responsibility. Feels like they have some sort of "leverage" on corporations and governments and other organisations.
- panarky 3y ago
  Exploit began on May 15. Microsoft drove out the attackers on June 16. But only after a customer tipped off company researchers of the intrusion. Is anyone at Microsoft paying attention? Other than the legion of PR flacks furiously obfuscating every fuckup?
- TX81Z 3y ago
  I think Google and Facebook ended up surpassing the old Microsoft evil, then regulators took the eyes of Microsoft, then after slowly testing the waters, they are going hardcore into all kinds of shady shit. Windows OS is basically just a wrapper for data mining for Microsoft’s very large, but ignored, adtech businesses (plural).
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    A reasonable assessment, IMHO. Each has followed the other. I have observed each of Google and Facebook seeming to believe it has the same sort of "leverage" over, e.g., national governments, as well as news organisations that produce content. A most recent instance is how Google responded to yet another government asking it to pay the country's news media for using their content as bait for ad targets^1. "OK then, we'll just prevent your citizens from accessing news through Google." This sort of "negotiation", read: lack thereof, really reeks of entitlement. 1. Purposely commercial usage, not merely "sharing a link" to some content on the web.
    - TX81Z 3y ago
      The news stuff is more a cascade of interrelated failures between governments, news outlets, and tech companies. Governments do a bad job of funding news production, newspapers didn’t take the internet seriously and made a massive mess out of it, and the tech companies just sucked out the remaining value and killed news. The fact is the big tech companies make next to nothing on news. It’s rational to just stop doing it if the value goes negative. If government wants to levy a real tax and use that money to fund and support news, fine - but these laws are based on a mistaken premise that somebody is making buckets of money in news. Nobody is.
still_grokking 3y ago
Where's the news? Exactly this is going on for at least the last 30 years. Nowadays they just seem to have better PR / marketing so the usual daily scandal has exactly zero impact on them. But form the perspective what they're doing, and how they're doing it, nothing ever changed. Microsoft is Microsoft. --- I've read at some point some revealed internal memos or emails from Microsoft, I guess from a court case as the PDF was full of scans of printed out stuff. It was about their internal strategy regarding competition (and actually their "partners" who they count to their competition more or less, only that they see them as a kind of "useful idiots"). Frankly I can't find the PDF right now but it would be really helpful here! It was likely something famous as I wouldn't have downloaded it back than. Who has the right link?

by jsnell 3y ago

andromaton 3y ago

I used to consider their cloud products secure. When bings home page (plus i don't know how many tenants) was found incorrectly protected a few months ago i stopped. Google will discontinue your product or lock you out. Microsoft will let third parties in . We need better "office" platform vendors.

lockhouse 3y ago
Google Cloud if you want to live dangerously Azure if you're a .NET shop and want good integration with Visual Studio AWS for everyone else
- bradleyjg 3y ago
  Azure’s salespeople are really good. In reality it’s azure if your cio insists.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Hilariously, Azure PaaS offerings of Microsoft products are notably worse than what is available in AWS. Examples: - SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) has no Azure PaaS, but there is an AWS PaaS for it. - RDS for SQL in AWS allows setting a time zone, Azure SQL Database is UTC only, breaking the majority of existing databases when migrated. (They confuse what "developers should do" with what "developers actually do".) - Azure's PaaS for Active Directory (Azure AD Domain Services) can only be linked to an Azure AD tenant, it can't be used as a standalone authoritative domain. AWS allows this scenario. Essentially, every Microsoft product you can think of is easier/cheaper/better on AWS instead of Azure. If Microsoft's CEO was still Bill Gates, heads would have rolled a long time ago.
  - Uvix 3y ago
    RDS for SQL Server does have some features missing from Azure SQL Database (SSAS and time zones as you said, but also SSRS). As a PaaS service it's pretty rough around the edges, though: scaling requires a long outage, copying a database between servers requires doing a backup to S3 and restoring from that, and the AWS backup/restore operates on the server level rather than the database level. Where AWS really showed its unsuitability to host applications on the Microsoft stack was that AWS doesn't have a PaaS way to host .NET Framework web applications; IaaS is the only option. So both .NET Framework web application nor Microsoft SQL Server database were noticeably harder on AWS than Azure for us. Standing up one IaaS server to host SSRS in Azure was a lot less work than accounting for all the gaps on the AWS side would have been.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      Azure SQL database doesn’t support .BAK files. It can only import or export in BACPAC format which is SQL statements in a zip file and is an order of magnitude slower to restore. We’ve had issues where large databases would take forever to cut over to the PaaS database and cause long outages during migrations. It’s these random feature gaps that make these platforms difficult to deal with.
      - Uvix 3y ago
        BACPACs are the only option to get a database out of Azure SQL. And yes, they do suck, for the reasons you outlined. For the initial migration to PaaS, whether Azure or AWS RDS, it’s faster and easier to use replication instead of BACPACs. For moves within the Azure SQL environment, they have database copy functionality that can be utilized. (Which RDS doesn’t have, and I would have sorely missed if we hadn’t pulled the plug on AWA.)
        jiggawatts 3y ago
        Replication is a breaking schema change, and incompatible with a long list of features and applications.

pwarner 3y ago

I get the sense the old MS is alive and well.

blibble 3y ago
did their reputation ever change from being a company that produces mostly bad quality unreliable software, that is only ever purchased by someone that wion't have to use it on a daily basis? Teams, Sharepoint, PowerBI, the ad platform that is Windows, Azure all terrible (not to mention the ruthless business practices)
- reaperducer 3y ago
  did their reputation ever change from being a company that produces mostly bad quality unreliable software, that is only ever purchased by someone that wion't have to use it on a daily basis? Yes. Especially on HN. Microsoft used its video game systems and Linux flirtations as Trojan horses to convince a generation of tech-centric people that the bad old Microsoft of yore is just something that old people worry about and that today MS is all rainbows and unicorns. HN is full of people willing to fall in their swords for MS because they weren't around for its last round of despicable behavior, and bringing it up just means you're out of touch.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    VSCode seems like a biggie as well.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    Microsoft don't make tens of billions of dollars in revenue every quarter by "convincing people of rainbows and unicorns". Azure didn't pass $100Bn in annual revenue in 2022 by "Trojan horses". > "HN is full of people willing to fall in their swords for MS because they weren't around for its last round of despicable behavior" When was this last round? Is HN full of 20 year olds? Microsoft is really popular with the youth of today? That's nearly halfway back to when Microsoft was founded.
- 3y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

FWIW, I have long asked such questions about MSFT. In the 1990s there was more open criticism of the company's practices. Not anymore. As suggested by the parent, "nobody seems to care." IMO, this sort of Teflon coating attitude has existed for many, many years. It seems that MSFT is above fault and responsibility. Feels like they have some sort of "leverage" on corporations and governments and other organisations.

panarky 3y ago
Exploit began on May 15. Microsoft drove out the attackers on June 16. But only after a customer tipped off company researchers of the intrusion. Is anyone at Microsoft paying attention? Other than the legion of PR flacks furiously obfuscating every fuckup?
TX81Z 3y ago
I think Google and Facebook ended up surpassing the old Microsoft evil, then regulators took the eyes of Microsoft, then after slowly testing the waters, they are going hardcore into all kinds of shady shit. Windows OS is basically just a wrapper for data mining for Microsoft’s very large, but ignored, adtech businesses (plural).
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  A reasonable assessment, IMHO. Each has followed the other. I have observed each of Google and Facebook seeming to believe it has the same sort of "leverage" over, e.g., national governments, as well as news organisations that produce content. A most recent instance is how Google responded to yet another government asking it to pay the country's news media for using their content as bait for ad targets^1. "OK then, we'll just prevent your citizens from accessing news through Google." This sort of "negotiation", read: lack thereof, really reeks of entitlement. 1. Purposely commercial usage, not merely "sharing a link" to some content on the web.
  - TX81Z 3y ago
    The news stuff is more a cascade of interrelated failures between governments, news outlets, and tech companies. Governments do a bad job of funding news production, newspapers didn’t take the internet seriously and made a massive mess out of it, and the tech companies just sucked out the remaining value and killed news. The fact is the big tech companies make next to nothing on news. It’s rational to just stop doing it if the value goes negative. If government wants to levy a real tax and use that money to fund and support news, fine - but these laws are based on a mistaken premise that somebody is making buckets of money in news. Nobody is.

still_grokking 3y ago

Where's the news? Exactly this is going on for at least the last 30 years. Nowadays they just seem to have better PR / marketing so the usual daily scandal has exactly zero impact on them. But form the perspective what they're doing, and how they're doing it, nothing ever changed. Microsoft is Microsoft. --- I've read at some point some revealed internal memos or emails from Microsoft, I guess from a court case as the PDF was full of scans of printed out stuff. It was about their internal strategy regarding competition (and actually their "partners" who they count to their competition more or less, only that they see them as a kind of "useful idiots"). Frankly I can't find the PDF right now but it would be really helpful here! It was likely something famous as I wouldn't have downloaded it back than. Who has the right link?