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 do hope for a future where LLMs are so good at patching zero-days that the NSA and all other nation-state 'cyberwarfare' departments (ie software privateers) lose most their capability.
On the other hand, nation-states will be able to run massive GPU clusters full of LLMs dedicated to cyberwarfare. They certainly have the resources to do it.
Imagine the Huggingface incident, but with an agent swarm that's deliberately malicious instead of just misaligned.
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.
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.
"It seemed like a good idea at the time", especially when the people holding the purse strings think it's cheaper that way. So we drive without a safety belt because a safety belt would cost money.
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.
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.
Imagine the Huggingface incident, but with an agent swarm that's deliberately malicious instead of just misaligned.
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.
Edit: and you've spent time in Shanghai too! Small world!
“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?