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Microsoft Dependency Has Risks
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throwaway48476 1y agoIn the era of globalization businesses expected to only follow a set of harmonized global laws set through treaty. TPP etc. Now globalization is reversing and business is expected to follow the law of the nation they're from wherever they're operating. Such risks will have to be factored in now.
- velcrovan 1y agoBusinesses have never been exempt from the laws of the nation they're from.
- throwaway48476 1y agoThe expectation was that international trade courts would be placed above and overrule national courts. That's why the reaction to TPP was so negative.
- sammyoos 1y agoI'd argue that the laws that must be obeyed form an odd superset of the laws of the nation from where the organization is operating and the laws where the users are located. Where those laws intersect nicely, the mode of operation is clearly defined, where they do not intersect, the mode of operation becomes very tricky. (As we've seen with privacy, cookie laws, etc.)
- firesteelrain 1y agoFor most businesses, the cost and difficulty of shifting away from Microsoft outweigh the benefits
- marcodiego 1y ago[flagged]
- firesteelrain 1y agoI wasn't aware of any major Trump-era policies that significantly reduced Microsoft’s dominance. Curious what you're referencing?
- slantaclaus 1y agoI also haven't read the article but apparently reading the comments the article has to do with Trump-era policies affecting Microsoft
- firesteelrain 1y agoYeah, I skimmed the article too, but didn’t see much on Trump’s policies directly impacting Microsoft. From what I gather, the bigger challenges for businesses are more about the tech ecosystem Microsoft has built. It's hard to just swap out core services like AD without huge disruptions.
- throwaway_2121 1y ago> Yeah, I skimmed the article too, but didn’t see much on Trump’s policies directly impacting Microsoft. The first paragraph links to an article about how the International Criminal Court ’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email. This has caused some governments to worry. What if MS was ordered to block access to their software because the US wanted to apply pressure?
- firesteelrain 1y agoAh, that makes sense. I missed that detail on first read Yeah, I can see how events like that raise real concerns for foreign governments relying on US-based infrastructure. Even if Microsoft isn’t directly doing anything aggressive, the potential for state pressure is enough to make countries want more control over their tech stack
- kenjackson 1y agoFundamentally it’s hard to pushback against an authoritarian government. There is very little to stop Trump from sending Doge into MS headquarters with Marines and demanding admin access so they can make the change. Thinking the dependency on Microsoft (or any company) is the risk then you haven’t been paying attention.
- mulmen 1y agoThat’s the point of federation. If there’s no centralized target then the Marines have a much harder job.
- munchler 1y agoThe incident in question targeted someone outside of the US, where DOGE has no direct influence (yet).
- kenjackson 1y agoDOGE’s influence is wherever the administration wants it to be.
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y agoTell that to the ICC judges that have been sanctioned by Microsoft and Trump's administration. Because you know, sanctioning judges in the International Crime Court in Den Hague is literally not their (the US's) jurisdiction.
- axus 1y ago"I was horrified to learn that there’s an Azure container behind every cell of a spreadsheet executing the python code instead of… you know, my PC doing the work."
- hooverd 1y ago> There was a recent incident where Microsoft somehow allegedly blocked a mailbox of a sanctioned individual. Any organization highly depending on MS products that might come into the crosshair should ask - can this happen to me? What would be the cost? How much I invest into prevention of this scenario? In this article I try to get the facts straight and use a return on security investment calculation to try and judge this situation in a rational way. Let’s grab our tinfoil hats and find out if it’ll be fine. for people who didn't RTA
- bob1029 1y agoThe trick with Microsoft is to very carefully separate the good parts from the bad ones. Labeling all of Microsoft as banned is really constraining your technology options. This is a gigantic organization with a very diverse set of people in it. There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way. Azure and Windows are where things start to get bad with Microsoft.
- gerdesj 1y ago"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way." I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.
- privatelypublic 1y agoI think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen. Typescript is also Microsoft. So is ONNX.
- gerdesj 1y ago"I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen." I think you misunderstand: the market, ie the number of people who actually care about developing game engines, is tiny. How many games developers do you know as a subset of the people you know of? OP only managed to find a niche product area for MS to shine in and maintain traction - the moat thing. Nothing else apparently. I for one would not miss MS one jot. I wasted so much time with things like autoexec.bat and config.sys back in the day. I got good at it - Novell gave me a T shirt on Cool Solutions for a boot floppy image that managed to try several popular NIC drivers (3c595, 3c905, 3c509, ne1000 and a few others) and get you to a network connection for imaging or whatever. Later on I get to ignore SFC /SCANNOW answers to searches. Do you remember WINS? What about the horror of time sync? The PDC emulator FSMO role is basically a NT domain controller. AD was a bodge from day one, tacked onto ... Sorry, got carried away there. Again, Typescript is cared about by whom and what on earth is ONNX?
- jongjong 1y agoI can't understand why people are still using proprietary software like Windows or OSX when superior free software exists. It's a testament to the hidden monopolizing forces which exists in our society.
- duped 1y agoBecause the free software isn't superior
- jongjong 1y agoThen why is it that every person I know or even heard about who switched to Linux never went back to OSX or Windows? The only thing which made them use OSX or Windows in the first place was their ignorance of alternatives. Clearly you've never used any consumer-grade Linux distro like Ubuntu.
- duped 1y agoOSX hasn't existed for five years and hasn't been publicly advertised as that for much longer, so your sampling may be biased. > The only thing which made them use OSX or Windows in the first place was their ignorance of alternatives. No, it's the availability of daily software that people use, like Excel, Word, Outlook, etc. > Clearly you've never used any consumer-grade Linux distro like Ubuntu. I daily drive a Linux distro. I don't pretend it's better for the average human than MacOS or Windows. The market reflects that. Clearly, you've never worked in an office where the only thing available is a Windows or Mac laptop because those are what IT provides and that's where your customers/users are.
- protocolture 1y agoAre you kidding? By the time you get through the first half of the requirements document of most windows customers, OSX and Linux alternatives have already been thoroughly ruled out.
- metaltyphoon 1y ago
- hilbert42 1y agoI still find it hard to believe that so many people and companies are prepared to use Microsoft's online/cloud services. Not ony is this a single point of failure but it's one they've no control over whatsoever. Same goes for Google/Youtube etc. It's as risky as flying a passenger jet with only one engine. What are they thinking, why are they prepared to risk everything? It boggles my mind.
- bitpush 1y agoMost companies enter into a contract with Microsoft. That is infinitely better than using a 2 person startup that runs out of a garage. Contracts come with strict terms of service, SLAs, service expectations and such. If you had a restaurant, would you source your produce from your trusty friend who grows vegetables as a hobby or from an established mega-farming-company?
- samat 1y agoI would sure want to dine in a restaurant were vegetables were grown out of love and not as a profit making machine above all else.
- ramones13 1y agoSoftware from big companies can be made with love too?
- sipjca 1y agobut are they? on average? how do you measure this? it's pretty easy to talk to a solo-dev or gardener
- charcircuit 1y agoIt's easy to talk to Microsoft employees too.
- jimbobimbo 1y agoThis applies to any company homed in the US. Not sure why Microsoft is singled out. Why Google, or Amazon, or Apple would oppose demands of the US government?
- bee_rider 1y agoI suspect it was prompted by the specific story about Microsoft blocking that mailbox. So, that is probably why they were “singled out.”
- ArcHound 1y agoHello, author here - yes exactly. And also I don't think companies depend that completely on e.g. AWS
- not_a_bot_4sho 1y agoMaybe that's a good correction or follow up article to consider. These concerns aren't specific to Microsoft in any way. They apply to all tech companies that wish to operate within the United States.
- ArcHound 1y agoIt is a good point and a weaker spot of the article. First of all, I now cover MS since this incident made headlines. If you are aware of any such incident from the other providers, I am interested. Another argument is that more companies depend on MS more. Even in high-tech startups and scaleups you'll find traces of Win machines, AD and Office. On the other hand, there are plenty of companies that don't have AWS deployments at all.
- noirscape 1y agoAnother thing worth noting is that out of GAFAM, Microsoft is the only one that really has vertical business integration that's worth anything, which is why they're the default for so many companies. AWS is just a hyperscaler, they don't do the full business stack outside that. Google has a full business stack (read: office tools, email, hyperscaling) as an option, but the experience is miserable because Google constantly deprecates and changes things on a dime, which is why most people avoid them. Killedbygoogle stuff doesn't just apply to their non-paying customers, it applies to their paying customers as well. The moment you try to build anything outside of Gmail or Google Docs, you're subject to their whims and depreciation policies. (Case in point; Google has been sending me scare mails that they're going to kill an OAuth service I set up ages ago because it had no logins for 6 months. They just randomly decided it and gave me a month to deal with it. Their solution isn't just "hey, are you still active" - I am, that's easy to see - it's "just do a login and make sure you do a login every 6 months". If it was just a checkbox in their admin panel, I'd probably have done it without a second thought, but I really cba to figure out what the OAuth service was for, so I guess that OAuth service is gonna bite it now. Probably a selfhosted git forge or something that offered easy Google logins?) Apple has everything except for hyperscaling, but it's all aimed at normal users, not corporations; I'm pretty sure they don't even have a business version of iCloud? The closest is that they offer MDM and bulk buying individual plans afaik. (Facebook isn't in this industry at all.) Microsoft is the only one who offers a full kit and the promise that they won't pull the rug out under you. They're also the only one that really tries to take legal compliance and depreciation timelines/upgrade paths seriously. (AWS and Google just pass it off onto the customer with a "figure it out", while MS has loads of infrastructure for both of these.) It's a hard business to replace if Microsoft goes bad with O365/Azure.
- 0xWTF 1y agoI think the current subtrends of things like a resurgence of interest in mechanical watches, fountain pens, steampunk, etc, are sort of a large excursion on a dampening social problem: that technology is too far beyond our comprehension. Can you even even tell what network stack got you this packet? How about the protocols that got it from the network to your screen? How about the quantum mechanics of the phosphors that pushed out the photons? There are certainly techno-luddites/visionaries who are running their own email servers, but it's a pretty hostile environment for personal email servers. Ignoring the spam, just getting the existing big boys to trust you can be humiliating exercise in futility. Can I get by without Excel? Sure. Google Sheets? Sure. No spreadsheet at all? Gonna be hard.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoA good business continutiy plan will accept that and any other risk with the compensating control of insurance. Yes, there is a statistic and probability of your entire business going out like a lightswitch, however if you have insurance to mitigate that risk, it isn't game over.
- ArcHound 1y agoGenuine question that sounds like trolling: can you get an insurance against critical service provider going poof for political reasons?
- 1970-01-01 1y agoHere you are https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/guides/what-is-political-risk-insurance-162502.aspx https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/guides/what-is-polit...
- xvilka 1y agoGitHub is also from them and brings the very same risks. The solution would be to build viable open source alternative but decentralized. GitLab Federation [1] or Forgejo (Codeberg) Federation [2] might be the answer. [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6468 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6468 [2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
- ArcHound 1y agoHello, author here. The main point is that it's not a financially rational decision to ditch Microsoft. There's just no real alternative for businesses, as most use AD, Teams, Outlook/Exchange and couple others.
- lmm 1y agoI don't think expected value is the right way to evaluate this. All insurance is negative expected value (that's how insurance companies make a profit), but businesses find it rational to buy insurance. Also I'd say your risk of getting cut off is much more than 1 in 2 million, because there's nothing to say this can only be done to one company at a time. What if Trump adds e.g. a whole country to the sanction list, and tells Microsoft to cut that country off?
- ArcHound 1y agoThat's the trick behind ROSI. You weight the expected cost without mitigation against the mitigated cost plus the cost of your solution. The risk of getting cut off is the most random variable on the list. I agree with your point, but I have no data to back it up with.
- lmm 1y ago> That's the trick behind ROSI. You weight the expected cost without mitigation against the mitigated cost plus the cost of your solution. Right but that's clearly not the right way to think about it; if you did that you'd never buy insurance (and probably never do any security work tbh, since very little of it can be justified in expected value terms). The impact of catastrophic damage is nonlinear.
- ArcHound 1y agoYes, at the end of the article I come to the conclusion that this method has flaws. But the general insurance can be modelled with ROSI. Say you have a 300k USD car. Say that a crash will cost you the full cost. You expect one crash in five years. You then have a yearly expected cost of 60k. If you get an insurance that pays for it all, for 10k USD a year, your ROSI is 500% which sounds like this insurance product is great for you.
- BnnRGa 1y ago[dead]
- neepi 1y agoThe outlined risk is not solely a Microsoft risk. It’s a “contract out to another irreplaceable service” risk. Make your technology fungible and risks disappear.
- guiriduro 1y agoWe (the EU) should have a reasonable response for monopolistic or significant market share suppliers that may fall under the control of foreign governments that could mitigate this issue. Else I noted: (the EU) doesn't need to throw out the baby with the (US-controlled) bathwater. The EU should present Microsoft with an ultimatum similar to what China might: setup a non-controlled european licensee to own and manage all MS & Azure infrastructure in the region, or have some legislators force a similar structure on them. Complete control, full sourcecode, EU-only support/access - as a condition for corp HQ being allowed to have a monopolistic market share. Either way, nothing the US might decide to do should have any effect in "EU Microsoft", short of severing US Microsoft off completely, in which case EU MS just becomes fully autonomous and bye-bye US. Clearly, a US-controlled Microsoft without this structure is a deep security risk to europe now.
- zombot 1y ago> Make your technology fungible and risks disappear. Not wrong in principle, but the failure mode here is that the political winds have changed. Tech alone cannot help you if you do not hedge against that risk.
- AndyMcConachie 1y agoCompanies exist in jurisdictions. Jurisdictions have laws. Companies have to follow those laws.
- zombot 1y ago> The Trump politics are, for a lack of a better publishable word, unpredictable. That's one of his most powerful weapons. Like with terrorism, nobody knows who or what is going to be next on the executioner's block, and thus nobody can safeguard against it except cut all ties with the U.S. if you're lucky enough to be outside.
- ArcHound 1y agoI've never thought about the parallel with terrorism and now I can't unsee it.
- graemep 1y agoI am not convinced by the argument about cost, particularly "You’d still have to be more efficient than Microsoft though - that’s a challenge" 1. Most, even quite big organisations, do not have the complexities of operating at the scale of MS services. 2. I have no idea how efficient MS are. maybe they are highly efficient, but I know enough big businesses are inefficient that it is not a given.
- ArcHound 1y agoFair point. If you take it directly on a Walmart scale, then I'll argue that you can't outcompete Microsoft. Note that you need to bring your own ID, Auth, Office, desktop system, etc. If you have a smaller scale, then you've invested less resources into MS therefore you have a lesser budget to work with.
- graemep 1y agoI wonder. Even Walmart is still not operating at the scale the hyperscalers do, and their systems will be far less varied, far more homogenous and under their own control. They are big enough for a lot of economies of scale to kick in. > Note that you need to bring your own ID, Auth, Office, desktop system, etc. Do Microsoft entirely manage all these systems for them? Otherwise they just swap managing one system for another. A quick search seems to show Walmart do hire sysadmins so the current cost on top of what they pay MS is not zero.
- ArcHound 1y agoThe article I've linked about Walmart talked about Azure costs. So I'd say that yes, MS mostly manages the systems for them. Also, they need some of those hyperscale goodies as they need to work with load spikes e.g. on a Black Friday.