Microsoft became incompetent in IT

I hope the guideline is clearer. "Unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." is too ambiguous.

[dead]

Firefox "Containers" are great for this. I have color-coded tabs for various customer work accounts / tenants.

Peak Microsoft to me was 1999-2000. Office 2000 (though Office 97 was also excellent), Windows 2000, and Visual Basic 6.0 were great.

In my opinion, things started going downhill with Windows XP, with the introduction of product activation and the later introduction of forced software updates in Service Pack 2. I also don’t like the UI changes that Microsoft made in the 2000s, notably the Luna theme in Windows XP and the introduction of the ribbon in Office 2007. I still don’t like the ribbon nearly 20 years after its introduction.

My take is that 1990s Microsoft software tended to get out of my way. From the 2000s onward, it seems that Microsoft software often gets in my way. I found a refuge in Mac OS X, but in the past decade macOS has gotten more annoying.

Microsoft is still the best IT business partner for non-tech enterprise organisations. The sort of support you get as a tiny company or a private customer, like the stuff from the article, is similar to what you get from a lot of other tech companies. You get to talk with an AI if you're lucky enough that it's not just an automated system. Step into enterprise where Microsoft will call you when something goes wrong. Sure they've moved from old-scool product licenses to Azure, and their partner program is less "outsourced". The platform is still selling products that make it very easy to be an IT operations unit where your IT related corporate titles can tell the rest of the organisation that they are in constant talks with Microsoft who is working hard to resolve the issue.

It's an old tale, but Azure was sort of late to enter the market here in Europe compared to AWS (GCP was never really an option for a lot of sectors due to Google's inability to sell actual products without Big Brother). Anyway, in the early days AWS had terrible support, it was basically like trying to contact Google as a private customer even if you were a major company. Then came Azure and blew it's way into the enterprise sector, partly because Microsoft was already there but also because Microsoft did what they always do, and actually give you people to talk with. 3 months later we had an AWS representative calling us with a similar experience on sale. Google never adopted anything like it, but today AWS is frankly a great experience for enterprise as well.

The last part Microsoft has is that they bundle things. Teams didn't win because it was the best at what it did when it arrived. It won because nobody in non-tech enterprise would want to pay for a Teams alternative when they were already paying for Teams anyway. In Enterprise you don't pay the listing prices that you or I would if we were to buy office365, windows and some Azure services. You instead buy things through a partner program, and then some of the licenses are different than they otherwise would be.

There is no real alternative to it. All of Europe is looking into moving away from USA tech giants now. You can absolutely replace the Office365 platform with something like Open Deks, but you can't do it without having IT operations staff who can do a lot of the things Microsoft would typically do for you. Similarily you can absolutely run things on Hetzner or OVH, but not as easily as you could if you were doing the Azure vendor lock-in.

If it wasn't for the current geo-political situation, Microsoft would continue it's monopoly on non-tech organisations. For a good while anyway. Because ironically one of their strengths was familiarity. It used to be that when you hired someone, they knew Microsoft Office and they knew Windows, but they've lost that edge. Maybe because this blog entry is spot on as far as the private customer experience goes. Today the most frequently asked question from our new employees as far as IT goes is "can I get a mac?".