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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

What surprises me more than the fact that these systems are buggy and can put you in impossible situations is that people continue to accept them. Because no matter how dire things get as soon as it works again it's all forgiven and forgotten until the next near (hopefully) disaster strikes.

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Everyone fucking hates MS with good reason.

They have been in this steady march to pull people in using tricks/dark patterns, then the services they for people into are almost always half-assed and break for no obvious reason, with catastrophic results.

People don't accept these broken ass systems unless they have to. Look at how iPhones, Macs and Chromebooks made inroads. MS is going to lose out on the next generation of computing, but instead of improving, they are doubling down on the BS.

That's incredibly biased. Apple's ecosystem is rife with dark patterns. Ever seen the screen that allows you to say ask me later with an update and then just prompts you to enter your passcode so it will update anyway? Facebook wants my driver's license even though I know the email and username to an account. If you have an issue with Google, good luck getting a response from a human. It goes on and on. Microsoft is easily not the only one with these issues.

Google is an ad company. Presumably they're good at selling ads, they make $18B a quarter.

Facebook is also an ad company, with a stellar string of quarterly reports.

Apple is a hardware company. The phones are pretty nice.

Out of this list, Microsoft is the only software company, and they're the only ones who are very bad at delivering their core product(s).

Regarding macOS updates: there’s “Try in an Hour”/“Try Tonight” which does the thing you describe and “Remind Me Tomorrow” which only notifies you a day later. Wouldn’t describe that as a dark pattern.

There's a lot to dislike about some Apple software, but it mostly works, kind of.

In comparison MS are legendary for user-hostile experiences that fundamentally don't work and are time-wasting black holes of frustration and lost productivity.

You can even turn off automatic updates on Apple systems. Microsoft lets you pause them for 35 days, then requires you to update before you pause them again.

I was referring to iOS.

Because Microsoft is too big to fail. When implementing MFA for BigCorps, their internal infra teams often only know MS products and refuse to accept that there could be a better alternative (even when 100% compatible with their stack). It's the ultimate vendor lock-in.

No, it’s because it’s free with Exchange, and also because this can’t happen (even if you screw up and lose access to all of your global administrator accounts somehow, you can contact Microsoft and prove you own the domain name to get back in).

IIRC it's not free for a wider identity deployment, it has incremental pricing that makes it look free. It works out somewhat cheaper than a third party solution.

Setting up and running MFA for your business SUCKS. Microsoft is simply least shitty. Google has their own failure modes.

I'm open to hearing who is better that won't cost me an arm and a leg.

By the very nature of edge cases, most people don't experience them (in a given domain like "interacting with Microsoft products"). That said, this setup sounds broken af, maybe it's all so much worse than I realize...

What's the option? If I don't use a public cloud, my competitors will and they will outcompete me with a much smaller operation cost and a myriad of services (AI, etc) that are simple to use.

What spreadsheet program is superior to excel?

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