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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that this appears solely to be a failure with Office 365/Click-to-Run-based installations. If you buy your software instead of subscribing to it, and service Office with traditional Windows Update mechanisms... everything is fine today.

This is what happens when you rip out well-tested IT infrastructure that has a reasonable update distribution process and entrust the cloud to update your software for you.

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>Office 365/Click-to-Run-based installations. If you buy your software instead of subscribing to it...

I've never been clear on what CtR describes. The first CtR Office was Home & Student 2010, which was a purchase.

CtR is this containerized install-from-web platform that Microsoft came up with for .NET applications. Yeah, it's actually a lot of years old. But generally speaking, if you get an Office disc or ISO file (say, from Microsoft's Volume Licensing Center), and install it, you get a traditional Office install that gets serviced via KB downloads from Windows Update. If you get Office via a web download from office.com, you get CtR, which self-updates itself sort of like modern web browsers.

A huge difference for business is that Windows Update allows you to approve/deny updates and cache them on a local server with WSUS, whereas CtR leaves each machine to go talk with Microsoft amongst itself on what to install and mostly cuts your IT staff out of the loop.

You can gain some control of updates via GPO or installing with a config XML specified but you don't get anywhere near the granularity of WSUS.

I can spend a lot of cash up front on Exchange and Office, then deal with constantly patching them. Or I can spend only per seat/per month and the patching is automatic and the service is likely more reliable. After 3 years the costs are almost the same. Its not like my private environment is so much more stable than an MS datacenter. And the software has the same amount of bugs.

> the service is likely more reliable

I've seen about ten major Office 365 outages since my last major Exchange upgrade? I don't know how beliefs about cloud service uptime being good persist unless your IT staff were really, really bad at their jobs. My house is more stable than a MS datacenter. And by and large, I actually like Microsoft.

I would not call this a major outage. The service still worked, just not from a single client app, many apps still worked as did the web interface. My house is more stable too but my office is not. I've had UPS systems fail. I've had ISP outages. The overall up time is better, in the case of Exchange, than I could make it at the office - especially considering the 24/7 nature of email today. We need fewer IT people because we offload some of the work. I don't want to be Rambo.

I would say I've found "cloud engineer misconfigures something that knocks the whole service offline" happens more frequently than "my building has a hardware, power, or ISP failure". To some degree, I feel like cloud services have, after overengineering their redundancies for such common failures... introduced a far worse failure via their extremely sophisticated update cadence and orchestration systems.

I'm not a huge fan of cloud in general. Office 365 provides a lot of value for our organization. In addition to Office and Exchange we get a bunch of other things like Sharepoint, Forms, Flow, etc.

I had terrible problems with hosted Exchange from Intermedia. I've had pretty good luck with Exchange on Office 365.

Office 365 support is absolute garbage, they really want to punish you for contacting them, especially so if you've found a bug.

Office 365 support is quite good if you pay for E5 licenses. Better than most of our other vendors anyway.

Microsoft switched to no longer providing updated ISOs for Office 2019 and actively pushes Office 365. Plus their package management and update tools for enterprises are riddled with their own issues that makes managing hotfixes and updates a major PIA.

But the salesguy said these things wouldn't happen!

More like if anything like this happens we'll refund you.

Haha what? No, never. This just doesn't happen in the software world. Besides, Microsoft has some terrible SLAs. Even with Azure it is almost impossible to get a refund for outages that are entirely Microsoft's fault.

Refund? What's a refund? The customer is going to add more funds to their account, right? --some CEO somewhere

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