An email migration was that important that they decided to shake up quite a bit of the exec team? Or was the email migration stuff just internal politics playing out in the news?
Microsoft was like IBM after Bill Gates. Not a tech leader for many years until Microsoft pivot to Cloud computing and software as services.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ibm+pho...
https://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-can...
In France we've had to deal with LOUVOIS, the payroll software for all the armed branches, being an unending train wreck. There were quite a few families of deployed soldiers who had to deal with near-bankruptcy because of it.
Microsoft was still overwhelmingly a product company in the decade after Gates. It did not abandon its product-centric focus and switch to a service-centric business model ala IBM. IBM hasn't been a product heavy company in several decades at this point. Microsoft never stopped being product heavy.
IBM liquidated its core product businesses, one after another. Microsoft never did that.
Microsoft's sales increased dramatically during the Ballmer years, going from $23b in 2000 to $77b in 2013. IBM's sales haven't increased like that in decades (quite the opposite in fact, they've had a stagnant or contracting business for a long time).
The cloud boom that Microsoft is currently enjoying, was planted during the Ballmer era, and it's being very successfully harvested during the Nadella era.
Nadella is a superior CEO to Ballmer, and far superior at product. However Ballmer did not wreck the ship nor switch Microsoft to being primarily service focused in the model of IBM. IBM by contrast is a wrecked ship.
Whoa.
How do you fail an email migration and not have email for your employees? How do you let this affect billing and invoices?
Why haven't they at least set up something temporary?
Yes, just spin up e-mail addresses for 400,000 people in 177 countries. No problem. Just run it on a Raspberry Pi in the basement.
Focus on the core business competencies, of which email is clearly not one.
Edit since I can't reply: An extended email outage isn't a good look either. If IBM can't run their own critical systems, why trust them with yours? I personally think making the strategic decision to outsource demonstrates the ability and desire to find timely solutions.
If their main revenue is doing consulting for businesses and their own IT projects have horrible failures why would you pick them?
Its like hearing your plumber has leaking and broken pipes in their house.
Why?
Because the money making was more important (getting projects, sending seniors and principals off to projects etc)
TLDR: due to a bad email migration, IBM has had massive email issues. Even the representative for the company had to give the statement to the press over the phone.