You know what’s funny about that? I can think of at 4 times in just the last year where a Microsoft outage caused significant downtime (at least 1 hour) for the company I work at.

• Twice, Outlook/Teams was having major regional issues for hours, people at my company couldn’t log into Teams and weren’t getting emails.
• Microsoft’s Dynamics platform, (which my company’s ERP software is built on) had some infrastructure issue that made it unusably slow for several hours.
• Who can forget the lovely Crowd Strike kiss of death fiasco a few months ago?

Meanwhile, the 12 year old janky Debian servers I had were running Ansible, Docker, OpenProject, and several other services without a hitch, same with all the Linux endpoints I had deployed.

Centralization causes many of these problems and makes them more severe than they otherwise would be. When you are locked into a single vendor for everything you do, you’re completely at their mercy if anything breaks.

The problem is that nobody, at least in the US, markets open source solutions. The big players corner the market, and IT just learn those big players. You should see the looks I’ve been given when I present IT directors with a quote from ix Systems for a TrueNAS solution to their storage needs. They have no idea who they are, even though they provide enterprise grade storage solutions at a fraction of the price of Dell or HP.

The US tech environment is a cyber dystopia controlled by the Tech corpos of silicon valley. It’s so frustrating.