6 ms·

Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

48 points by sergdigon 10mo ago

bell-cot 10mo ago
Should the Netherlands fear the North Sea? It looks so beautiful and benevolent! Major storms are extremely rare, and the Deltawerken has been a huge waste of time and resources...
piker 10mo ago
People forget that Microsoft was in position to compete because of Gates' and Allen's stellar BASIC. They were hand-picked by IBM because the market loved BASIC to the point of pirating it before that was even a thing. They cared about the product. In some of the Microsoft lore there seems to be a split between Gates as an "end user" guy and Ballmer as an "enterprise" guy. Despite taking his lumps in the late 2010s, it seems like Ballmer has prevailed as correct in his "enterprise" push. Microsoft has gotten really good at selling over steak dinners. Now Azure and M365 are starting to dominate. This gives Microsoft a strong distribution platform to push crappy initial versions of any would-be competitors to drive them out. They do tend to iterate those into decent products around the 3rd version. But will people tire of that? I think so. In which case Microsoft will get what's coming.
- netdevphoenix 10mo ago
  I thought that while Ballmer started the idea, Nadella is the one seen as pivoting the whole company towards the whole cloud first concept
  - piker 10mo ago
    That might be true, but I think Ballmer claims the "Enterprise Agreement" concept where they just tack on everything as available and have a box for every possible product in the EA. [Edit: The note is really more about founders originally in position to influence the company culture.]
  - pjmlp 10mo ago
    To the point the whole desktop development experience makes us grey hairs miss Balmer. Nadella would rather sell thin clients into Azure OS mainframe.
    - Cyan488 10mo ago
      As someone that (for now) only ever has 2 digits worth of grey hairs at a time, I feel the same.
    - neutronicus 10mo ago
      It definitely seems like Visual Studio is no longer feeling the love. IMO Visual Studio presented an incredible opportunity to sell Copilot. Implement a MCP server, give the LLMs in Copilot all the tools available to a human developer to analyze and debug a codebase. Instead it's just a shitty autocomplete you have to turn off in order to get the good, IntelliSense autocomplete working. Our parent company went hilt-deep into Copilot and ... now they're backing off, because nobody likes it! I just don't get it. They couldn't get the AI people and the Visual Studio people in a room together? I guess, cynically, probably not, because the AI people aren't on the same continent as the Visual Studio people? Very frustrating.
      - pjmlp 10mo ago
        You need to jump into VS 2026 for those goodies. It was so rushed out, that many of the dialog windows on the new settings pane show tiny VS 2022 settings dialogs as popups.
        neutronicus 10mo ago
        Wait, can VS2026 Copilot make tool calls to bring only relevant type and function definitions into Context? If yes, that would be great! I've been trying to bodge that together with clangd and emacs LSP, but the amount of yak shaving to get clangd actually working on our codebase (on which Visual Studio just works for the most part) is prohibitive for actually accomplishing anything. Our codebase is millions of line of very non-standard C++ (some automatically translated from Pascal years ago), and single files can get up to 50,000 lines. So a LLM really needs (just like us human developers!) the ability to skip around and only read the parts that matter.
- renegade-otter 10mo ago
  Gates cared about products deeply. This lot? They only care about the shareholder, not the customer, and we all know how that turned out for GE and Boeing. It's a long path, but it's a path of degradation. I am pretty sure the the file explorer is "slow" because it's doing cloud sync crap in order to collect my data.
  - snarfy 10mo ago
    Balmer figured out the most profitable product is compliance sold to governments and other corporations. And Nadella figured out it's more profitable to lease it.
  - cholantesh 10mo ago
    Considering Gates was instrumental in bringing MS and OpenAI together, I think this is just greatmanning.
    - renegade-otter 10mo ago
      Where is this information even coming from? https://businesschief.com/news/why-bill-gates-warned-microsofts-ceo-over-openai-investment https://businesschief.com/news/why-bill-gates-warned-microso...
- sys_64738 10mo ago
  > People forget that Microsoft was in position to compete because of Gates' and Allen's stellar BASIC. They were hand-picked by IBM because the market loved BASIC to the point of pirating it before that was even a thing. They cared about the product. I thought the whole MS-DOS thing happened due to Billy's mom being secretary for the law firm that had IBM as a client.
deaux 10mo ago
Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization. They must have some personal incentive in one way or another to keep close to the status quo. Anyone large organization has ever moved away from dependency on US BigTech has done so piece by piece. China is the prime example. They've been decreasing their dependencies every year back from when it was at its highest. Percentage by percentage. This is the way. > “Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.” > And switching only partially would require a lot of extra administrative work and money, and wouldn't reduce the risk of data blocking. The American giant is the largest supplier of software and services to TU/e. I'd be surprised if this article wasn't indirectly written by Microsoft.
- jack_tripper 10mo ago
  >Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization. That's modern academia for you.
  - cholantesh 10mo ago
    The CISO of a university is not an academic; neither is a writer at its student magazine.
- johnwheeler 10mo ago
  I think China generally pirates all of our software in the U.S.
  - gabrielgio 10mo ago
    That is a common practice. For example, look it up on the history of Swiss Pharma industry. They grew from pirating to enforcer once they got industry lead. I pretty sure we can find examples for US, Japan, India and what not. Only the country on top of a given sector care about enforcing patent.
CharlieDigital 10mo ago
The article is quite light in its definition of "monopoly". It's hard to take this seriously given that the ecosystem of alternatives has never been richer, IMO. Word processing? Notion for web natives; my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office. Email? Same for Gmail vs Outlook. Messaging? While Microsoft gets a big chunk of the market via bundling Teams, there's Slack and a slew of options on the market for enterprise chat and messaging. They've also been forced to unbundle Teams in the EU market[0] Cloud? AWS still holds a commanding lead and there are other vendors like Google, Oracle, et al. that offer competitive products. Operating systems? My kids are growing up on ChromeOS. My dev team is maybe 80% macOS and 20% Linux. All of our software is shipped as Linux containers. The OS that most of us are interacting with is probably made by Google (Android, Android Auto, Android Watch, Google TV) or Apple (iOS, CarPlay, Apple TV) or open source (Linux) and not Microsoft. The OS running most of the software we access via the web is not Windows Server. The database that is backing the majority of those servers is not SQL Server and more likely to be Postgres or MySQL. AI? Microsoft has aligned themselves with OpenAI, but it's not hard to see that Google is very competitive in this space as is Anthropic not to mention the Chinese teams doing stellar work with model advancement despite (or maybe as a reaction to) Western restrictions on hardware. Microsoft's open source VS Code and Copilot let you pick from a slate of Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI models. Browsers? Search? Ad platforms? Social media? No, not even close to a monopoly. Gaming and leisure? Nope. To be clear, I'm not here to defend Microsoft; I'm voicing my disdain for a very poorly written article that in no way backs up the claim of Microsoft's "monopoly". By all means, please point out Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but do so with evidence and facts -- not your feelings and dated takes from the 90's. Very, very hard to take this seriously without more specifics or context (possible in some narrow context, Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly). At least from my perspective, for Microsoft to survive these days, they have to have at least a decent product at a competitive price; otherwise, there's always a strong competitor in every one of their major profit areas. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_2048 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  Switching from Office to Libre Office would take about ten minutes training, for most people's usage. The software can be installed in less than that. Just another log on the fire: Microsoft holds a lion's share of market, but not a monopoly (anymore).
Rakshath_1 10mo ago
[flagged]
MangoToupe 10mo ago
> Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.” This seems much less like a "monopoly" sort of situation and more of a "you explicitly chose to put all of your eggs in one basket" kind of deal.
kevin061 10mo ago
There are Microsoft alternatives for everything they offer. OS: Ubuntu is British, Linux Mint is Irish, there are French distributions, and let's not forget SUSe from Germany. Office: there is LibreOffice, which is not very good IMO, but also OnlyOffice, I think it is German, also Proton, and Infomaniak from CH. For file sharing, NextCloud exists, but if you want cloud services, there's Jottacloud, Koofr, Proton Drive, and more. For cloud, Hetzner and OVH may not be as comprehensive, but that just means you have to hire consultants and specialists to simplify deployments to something similar to AWS tools. Perfectly possible. E-mail, you can self-host or just use Tutanota, Protonmail, Soverin, mailbox.org; there are thousands, really. To believe that we can keep Microsoft under control just because there is a financial transaction in between is to believe in the more than debunked Angela Merkel policy or pacifying and democratising Russia through trade. Germany stood behind Angela Merkel for years, and at the end, Russia invaded Georgia and Ukraine anyway. Peace through trade does not work. The question is whether the Netherlands values money more than sovereignty, because of course Microsoft offers an all-in-one solution to governments, but the other options are all small parts of the IT ecosystem, which can be difficult to keep together.
- carlosjobim 10mo ago
  How did you forget that Apple offers alternatives to almost everything Microsoft has, and is one of the world's largest companies?
  - kryllic 10mo ago
    You likely won't find a business office working exclusively with the Apple office suite of tools, despite how comparable their features are. No one ever got fired for suggesting Microsoft, and in the business world, the safest choice (read: one that ensures an individual's job security) is often the one people go to. Google also has its own suite of tools, and I would argue the choice is really between them and Microsoft, with Apple not receiving much attention. Proton is also creating their own office suite of tools, their version of Sheets was just released not too long ago [1] but I have a feeling they will be as ostracized in the business world as Apple is. --- 1. https://proton.me/drive/sheets https://proton.me/drive/sheets
johnwheeler 10mo ago
Someone needs to explain vendor lock-in to them.
gabrielgio 10mo ago
> Even if the Netherlands makes every effort now, a fully-fledged alternative won't be readily available. You don't need to match their product. You have a smaller user base and smaller number of functionally to cover than Microsoft. > That gives American companies power. Guess what happens if you don't do anything? The trend of universities sacrificing long-term sovereignty for minimal short-term savings is concerning. I have observed this in my home country, where the strategic investment in national technology (which would return back to the country) is dismissed in favor of cheaper foreign platforms like Google. This approach naively puts sensitive research and institutional data on external servers, creating vulnerability where access could be compromised[^1]. Hopefully this person does not express the opinion of that university. [^1]: https://agorarn.com.br/ultimas/google-bloqueia-acesso-ufrn-conteudos/ https://agorarn.com.br/ultimas/google-bloqueia-acesso-ufrn-c...
- jack_tripper 10mo ago
  >The interruption occurred after the institution exceeded the 152.5 terabyte storage limit contracted with the technology giant, which maintains a partnership with UFRN . 152 TB is something nerds self host in closet home labs, no need to tie yourself up to Google. I though people went to google for solutions with much more scale than just 152TB. I did a quick check and for a name-brand (but not DELL or HPE solution) 200TB self hosted server with redundancy you're looking at 16K USD upfront cost and then you need to add your own maintenance and support costs which shouldn't be too high with Brazil labor costs and university's easy access to (often voluntary) skilled labor. From what I can gather this is still cheaper than paying Google.
ngcc_hk 10mo ago
If there is a monopoly, anyone should be afraid. Even if it is government. That is why you have democracy. Second source … is one of the example of a major strategy against this.
input_sh 10mo ago
> TU/e and ICT cooperative SURF are also looking for replacements for Microsoft and Google. However, a fully-fledged European alternative is not yet available... The only possible alternative to the entirety of Microsoft/Google is a European monopoly that is similar in scale. Indeed, such a monopoly does not exist (nor should it). People go to Microsoft and Google because they're already spending money on one product of theirs and there happens to be this completely different product of theirs which you also need as a business user. Sooner or later you end up using 20 completely different products that are "well-integrated" because at no point did you look for an alternative to any of those use cases. Your job is not to go from 100% reliance on Google/Microsoft to 0% reliance, that'll never happen. Your job is to look at their offerings in isolation and reduce your reliance one product at a time. And yes, paying for 20 products from 20 companies is gonna cost you more when each of them needs to be profitable separately, only monopolies can afford to offer some product at a permanent loss.
opentokix 10mo ago
Why does it have to be "fully fledged" - not like most people use the advanced features in office. It's a procurement fallacy to let a corporation dictate what features should be there and not.
estimator7292 10mo ago
No because Microsoft no longer has the competency to maintain and leverage a monopoly. They'll keep rolling on inertia and Azure. Windows and Office are likely on a terminal decline from which Microsoft is unwilling or unable to recover.
Incipient 10mo ago
My biggest issue is identity. One login for device, sql server/data access, powerbi/reporting, office/productivity (and all its connectivity) as well as communications. What alternative does anyone have?
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
svilen_dobrev 10mo ago
in 6th edition of Ian Sommerville's "Software engineering" textbook, there was a whole chapter on legacy software. How to fix, how to emulate, copy, migrate, whatever. Technical issues slowly progressing into human/social. Maybe because it was after the y2k. Then in 8th, it got merged into other sub/chapters, and later ones the topic is even more muddied. There's no more legacy software, right? Except there is.. all of it may become a burden, because of time or because of politics. Come on, that is an University, there are many many students eager to learn the art-of-migration, for free. Migrate away, one by one, department by department if needs be. Disable M$ Excel, give everyone Libreoffice , python, r, or any-other-linux-stuff, and if the professors are so wooden, let the students find a way to replace that wonder.xls with something else. Then repeat with next piece of the entanglement.. But, no, only complaining (a.k.a. need more money)
jmclnx 10mo ago
I am more worried about M/S influence over the Linux Foundation than this. In reality people only have themselves to blame if they decide to use Microsoft than an alternative.
jadenconelly6 10mo ago
[dead]

48 points by sergdigon 10mo ago

Should the Netherlands fear the North Sea? It looks so beautiful and benevolent! Major storms are extremely rare, and the Deltawerken has been a huge waste of time and resources...

piker 10mo ago

People forget that Microsoft was in position to compete because of Gates' and Allen's stellar BASIC. They were hand-picked by IBM because the market loved BASIC to the point of pirating it before that was even a thing. They cared about the product. In some of the Microsoft lore there seems to be a split between Gates as an "end user" guy and Ballmer as an "enterprise" guy. Despite taking his lumps in the late 2010s, it seems like Ballmer has prevailed as correct in his "enterprise" push. Microsoft has gotten really good at selling over steak dinners. Now Azure and M365 are starting to dominate. This gives Microsoft a strong distribution platform to push crappy initial versions of any would-be competitors to drive them out. They do tend to iterate those into decent products around the 3rd version. But will people tire of that? I think so. In which case Microsoft will get what's coming.

netdevphoenix 10mo ago
I thought that while Ballmer started the idea, Nadella is the one seen as pivoting the whole company towards the whole cloud first concept
- piker 10mo ago
  That might be true, but I think Ballmer claims the "Enterprise Agreement" concept where they just tack on everything as available and have a box for every possible product in the EA. [Edit: The note is really more about founders originally in position to influence the company culture.]
- pjmlp 10mo ago
  To the point the whole desktop development experience makes us grey hairs miss Balmer. Nadella would rather sell thin clients into Azure OS mainframe.
  - Cyan488 10mo ago
    As someone that (for now) only ever has 2 digits worth of grey hairs at a time, I feel the same.
  - neutronicus 10mo ago
    It definitely seems like Visual Studio is no longer feeling the love. IMO Visual Studio presented an incredible opportunity to sell Copilot. Implement a MCP server, give the LLMs in Copilot all the tools available to a human developer to analyze and debug a codebase. Instead it's just a shitty autocomplete you have to turn off in order to get the good, IntelliSense autocomplete working. Our parent company went hilt-deep into Copilot and ... now they're backing off, because nobody likes it! I just don't get it. They couldn't get the AI people and the Visual Studio people in a room together? I guess, cynically, probably not, because the AI people aren't on the same continent as the Visual Studio people? Very frustrating.
    - pjmlp 10mo ago
      You need to jump into VS 2026 for those goodies. It was so rushed out, that many of the dialog windows on the new settings pane show tiny VS 2022 settings dialogs as popups.
      - neutronicus 10mo ago
        Wait, can VS2026 Copilot make tool calls to bring only relevant type and function definitions into Context? If yes, that would be great! I've been trying to bodge that together with clangd and emacs LSP, but the amount of yak shaving to get clangd actually working on our codebase (on which Visual Studio just works for the most part) is prohibitive for actually accomplishing anything. Our codebase is millions of line of very non-standard C++ (some automatically translated from Pascal years ago), and single files can get up to 50,000 lines. So a LLM really needs (just like us human developers!) the ability to skip around and only read the parts that matter.
renegade-otter 10mo ago
Gates cared about products deeply. This lot? They only care about the shareholder, not the customer, and we all know how that turned out for GE and Boeing. It's a long path, but it's a path of degradation. I am pretty sure the the file explorer is "slow" because it's doing cloud sync crap in order to collect my data.
- snarfy 10mo ago
  Balmer figured out the most profitable product is compliance sold to governments and other corporations. And Nadella figured out it's more profitable to lease it.
- cholantesh 10mo ago
  Considering Gates was instrumental in bringing MS and OpenAI together, I think this is just greatmanning.
  - renegade-otter 10mo ago
    Where is this information even coming from? https://businesschief.com/news/why-bill-gates-warned-microsofts-ceo-over-openai-investment https://businesschief.com/news/why-bill-gates-warned-microso...
sys_64738 10mo ago
> People forget that Microsoft was in position to compete because of Gates' and Allen's stellar BASIC. They were hand-picked by IBM because the market loved BASIC to the point of pirating it before that was even a thing. They cared about the product. I thought the whole MS-DOS thing happened due to Billy's mom being secretary for the law firm that had IBM as a client.

deaux 10mo ago

Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization. They must have some personal incentive in one way or another to keep close to the status quo. Anyone large organization has ever moved away from dependency on US BigTech has done so piece by piece. China is the prime example. They've been decreasing their dependencies every year back from when it was at its highest. Percentage by percentage. This is the way. > “Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.” > And switching only partially would require a lot of extra administrative work and money, and wouldn't reduce the risk of data blocking. The American giant is the largest supplier of software and services to TU/e. I'd be surprised if this article wasn't indirectly written by Microsoft.

jack_tripper 10mo ago
>Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization. That's modern academia for you.
- cholantesh 10mo ago
  The CISO of a university is not an academic; neither is a writer at its student magazine.
johnwheeler 10mo ago
I think China generally pirates all of our software in the U.S.
- gabrielgio 10mo ago
  That is a common practice. For example, look it up on the history of Swiss Pharma industry. They grew from pirating to enforcer once they got industry lead. I pretty sure we can find examples for US, Japan, India and what not. Only the country on top of a given sector care about enforcing patent.

CharlieDigital 10mo ago

The article is quite light in its definition of "monopoly". It's hard to take this seriously given that the ecosystem of alternatives has never been richer, IMO. Word processing? Notion for web natives; my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office. Email? Same for Gmail vs Outlook. Messaging? While Microsoft gets a big chunk of the market via bundling Teams, there's Slack and a slew of options on the market for enterprise chat and messaging. They've also been forced to unbundle Teams in the EU market[0] Cloud? AWS still holds a commanding lead and there are other vendors like Google, Oracle, et al. that offer competitive products. Operating systems? My kids are growing up on ChromeOS. My dev team is maybe 80% macOS and 20% Linux. All of our software is shipped as Linux containers. The OS that most of us are interacting with is probably made by Google (Android, Android Auto, Android Watch, Google TV) or Apple (iOS, CarPlay, Apple TV) or open source (Linux) and not Microsoft. The OS running most of the software we access via the web is not Windows Server. The database that is backing the majority of those servers is not SQL Server and more likely to be Postgres or MySQL. AI? Microsoft has aligned themselves with OpenAI, but it's not hard to see that Google is very competitive in this space as is Anthropic not to mention the Chinese teams doing stellar work with model advancement despite (or maybe as a reaction to) Western restrictions on hardware. Microsoft's open source VS Code and Copilot let you pick from a slate of Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI models. Browsers? Search? Ad platforms? Social media? No, not even close to a monopoly. Gaming and leisure? Nope. To be clear, I'm not here to defend Microsoft; I'm voicing my disdain for a very poorly written article that in no way backs up the claim of Microsoft's "monopoly". By all means, please point out Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but do so with evidence and facts -- not your feelings and dated takes from the 90's. Very, very hard to take this seriously without more specifics or context (possible in some narrow context, Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly). At least from my perspective, for Microsoft to survive these days, they have to have at least a decent product at a competitive price; otherwise, there's always a strong competitor in every one of their major profit areas. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_2048 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

IAmBroom 10mo ago
Switching from Office to Libre Office would take about ten minutes training, for most people's usage. The software can be installed in less than that. Just another log on the fire: Microsoft holds a lion's share of market, but not a monopoly (anymore).

Rakshath_1 10mo ago

[flagged]

MangoToupe 10mo ago

> Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.” This seems much less like a "monopoly" sort of situation and more of a "you explicitly chose to put all of your eggs in one basket" kind of deal.

kevin061 10mo ago

There are Microsoft alternatives for everything they offer. OS: Ubuntu is British, Linux Mint is Irish, there are French distributions, and let's not forget SUSe from Germany. Office: there is LibreOffice, which is not very good IMO, but also OnlyOffice, I think it is German, also Proton, and Infomaniak from CH. For file sharing, NextCloud exists, but if you want cloud services, there's Jottacloud, Koofr, Proton Drive, and more. For cloud, Hetzner and OVH may not be as comprehensive, but that just means you have to hire consultants and specialists to simplify deployments to something similar to AWS tools. Perfectly possible. E-mail, you can self-host or just use Tutanota, Protonmail, Soverin, mailbox.org; there are thousands, really. To believe that we can keep Microsoft under control just because there is a financial transaction in between is to believe in the more than debunked Angela Merkel policy or pacifying and democratising Russia through trade. Germany stood behind Angela Merkel for years, and at the end, Russia invaded Georgia and Ukraine anyway. Peace through trade does not work. The question is whether the Netherlands values money more than sovereignty, because of course Microsoft offers an all-in-one solution to governments, but the other options are all small parts of the IT ecosystem, which can be difficult to keep together.

carlosjobim 10mo ago
How did you forget that Apple offers alternatives to almost everything Microsoft has, and is one of the world's largest companies?
- kryllic 10mo ago
  You likely won't find a business office working exclusively with the Apple office suite of tools, despite how comparable their features are. No one ever got fired for suggesting Microsoft, and in the business world, the safest choice (read: one that ensures an individual's job security) is often the one people go to. Google also has its own suite of tools, and I would argue the choice is really between them and Microsoft, with Apple not receiving much attention. Proton is also creating their own office suite of tools, their version of Sheets was just released not too long ago [1] but I have a feeling they will be as ostracized in the business world as Apple is. --- 1. https://proton.me/drive/sheets https://proton.me/drive/sheets

johnwheeler 10mo ago

Someone needs to explain vendor lock-in to them.

gabrielgio 10mo ago

> Even if the Netherlands makes every effort now, a fully-fledged alternative won't be readily available. You don't need to match their product. You have a smaller user base and smaller number of functionally to cover than Microsoft. > That gives American companies power. Guess what happens if you don't do anything? The trend of universities sacrificing long-term sovereignty for minimal short-term savings is concerning. I have observed this in my home country, where the strategic investment in national technology (which would return back to the country) is dismissed in favor of cheaper foreign platforms like Google. This approach naively puts sensitive research and institutional data on external servers, creating vulnerability where access could be compromised[^1]. Hopefully this person does not express the opinion of that university. [^1]: https://agorarn.com.br/ultimas/google-bloqueia-acesso-ufrn-conteudos/ https://agorarn.com.br/ultimas/google-bloqueia-acesso-ufrn-c...

jack_tripper 10mo ago
>The interruption occurred after the institution exceeded the 152.5 terabyte storage limit contracted with the technology giant, which maintains a partnership with UFRN . 152 TB is something nerds self host in closet home labs, no need to tie yourself up to Google. I though people went to google for solutions with much more scale than just 152TB. I did a quick check and for a name-brand (but not DELL or HPE solution) 200TB self hosted server with redundancy you're looking at 16K USD upfront cost and then you need to add your own maintenance and support costs which shouldn't be too high with Brazil labor costs and university's easy access to (often voluntary) skilled labor. From what I can gather this is still cheaper than paying Google.

ngcc_hk 10mo ago

If there is a monopoly, anyone should be afraid. Even if it is government. That is why you have democracy. Second source … is one of the example of a major strategy against this.

input_sh 10mo ago

> TU/e and ICT cooperative SURF are also looking for replacements for Microsoft and Google. However, a fully-fledged European alternative is not yet available... The only possible alternative to the entirety of Microsoft/Google is a European monopoly that is similar in scale. Indeed, such a monopoly does not exist (nor should it). People go to Microsoft and Google because they're already spending money on one product of theirs and there happens to be this completely different product of theirs which you also need as a business user. Sooner or later you end up using 20 completely different products that are "well-integrated" because at no point did you look for an alternative to any of those use cases. Your job is not to go from 100% reliance on Google/Microsoft to 0% reliance, that'll never happen. Your job is to look at their offerings in isolation and reduce your reliance one product at a time. And yes, paying for 20 products from 20 companies is gonna cost you more when each of them needs to be profitable separately, only monopolies can afford to offer some product at a permanent loss.

opentokix 10mo ago

Why does it have to be "fully fledged" - not like most people use the advanced features in office. It's a procurement fallacy to let a corporation dictate what features should be there and not.

estimator7292 10mo ago

No because Microsoft no longer has the competency to maintain and leverage a monopoly. They'll keep rolling on inertia and Azure. Windows and Office are likely on a terminal decline from which Microsoft is unwilling or unable to recover.

Incipient 10mo ago

My biggest issue is identity. One login for device, sql server/data access, powerbi/reporting, office/productivity (and all its connectivity) as well as communications. What alternative does anyone have?

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

svilen_dobrev 10mo ago

in 6th edition of Ian Sommerville's "Software engineering" textbook, there was a whole chapter on legacy software. How to fix, how to emulate, copy, migrate, whatever. Technical issues slowly progressing into human/social. Maybe because it was after the y2k. Then in 8th, it got merged into other sub/chapters, and later ones the topic is even more muddied. There's no more legacy software, right? Except there is.. all of it may become a burden, because of time or because of politics. Come on, that is an University, there are many many students eager to learn the art-of-migration, for free. Migrate away, one by one, department by department if needs be. Disable M$ Excel, give everyone Libreoffice , python, r, or any-other-linux-stuff, and if the professors are so wooden, let the students find a way to replace that wonder.xls with something else. Then repeat with next piece of the entanglement.. But, no, only complaining (a.k.a. need more money)

jmclnx 10mo ago

I am more worried about M/S influence over the Linux Foundation than this. In reality people only have themselves to blame if they decide to use Microsoft than an alternative.

jadenconelly6 10mo ago

[dead]