Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

It's starting to feel to me like modern day Microsoft has some kind of a Teflon coating. In the last month alone they've had their flagship cloud services down for extended periods of time due to DDoS attacks, had their auth cookie signing keys compromised and abused at scale, and had a lawsuit reveal emails about how they were planning to use their cash at hand to buy all the content and destroy's Sony's gaming business.

And none of it has any impact, nobody seems to care.

The comments in this thread are crazy to me. Yes, dealing with targeted attacks by nation states is hard, and occasionally you'll fail. But that's part of the reason to pay Microsoft rather than try to host your own. In that situation the absolute minimum expectation is for MS to follow basic best practices. Nothing about this story suggests they've been doing that, it's just one wtf after another.

And their communication on this has been so bad an unclear that it has to have been intentionally obfuscatory.

FWIW, I have long asked such questions about MSFT. In the 1990s there was more open criticism of the company's practices. Not anymore. As suggested by the parent, "nobody seems to care." IMO, this sort of Teflon coating attitude has existed for many, many years. It seems that MSFT is above fault and responsibility. Feels like they have some sort of "leverage" on corporations and governments and other organisations.

Exploit began on May 15.

Microsoft drove out the attackers on June 16.

But only after a customer tipped off company researchers of the intrusion.

Is anyone at Microsoft paying attention?

Other than the legion of PR flacks furiously obfuscating every fuckup?

I think Google and Facebook ended up surpassing the old Microsoft evil, then regulators took the eyes of Microsoft, then after slowly testing the waters, they are going hardcore into all kinds of shady shit.

Windows OS is basically just a wrapper for data mining for Microsoft’s very large, but ignored, adtech businesses (plural).

A reasonable assessment, IMHO. Each has followed the other. I have observed each of Google and Facebook seeming to believe it has the same sort of "leverage" over, e.g., national governments, as well as news organisations that produce content. A most recent instance is how Google responded to yet another government asking it to pay the country's news media for using their content as bait for ad targets^1. "OK then, we'll just prevent your citizens from accessing news through Google." This sort of "negotiation", read: lack thereof, really reeks of entitlement.

1. Purposely commercial usage, not merely "sharing a link" to some content on the web.

The news stuff is more a cascade of interrelated failures between governments, news outlets, and tech companies.

Governments do a bad job of funding news production, newspapers didn’t take the internet seriously and made a massive mess out of it, and the tech companies just sucked out the remaining value and killed news.

The fact is the big tech companies make next to nothing on news. It’s rational to just stop doing it if the value goes negative.

If government wants to levy a real tax and use that money to fund and support news, fine - but these laws are based on a mistaken premise that somebody is making buckets of money in news. Nobody is.

"The fact is the big tech companies make next to nothing on news."

Perhaps these so-called "tech" companies need the traffic generated by people reading and sharing news stories. It makes no sense for "Google News" to exist if it makes next to nothing. It would be "irrational".

Google and Facebook keep track of every user navigation to a news story. The links are not direct. Of course this is for purely non-commercial purposes. Data collected is not used for commercial purposes. Yeah right.

https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06...

If it isn't valuable to Google to intermediate peoples' access to online news, then why doesn't Google stop doing it.

IMO, the issue is not that content producers such as news organsations are asking too much, it's that they are asking at all. The so-called "tech" company "business model" only works if the company does not have to pay anyone for content. If every producer whose content is being used by these companies to support and generate revenue from advertising services suddenly starts demanding payment, no matter how small, these "Big Tech" companies and their Golden Goose are cooked.

Even when regulators do pay attention, see Activision buyout, they have no teeth.

That was just really poor strategy by somebody who should not be in charge of the FTC. Major fuck up.

That leverage is installed base.

When your entire multinational runs on M365, SharePoint, OneDrive, exchange online, teams, Azure AD, you really don't want to know about its flaws because changing to another provider costs millions.

And what other provider? There's only Google and they have only a tiny share of the enterprise market. Everyone is in the same boat.

Ps speaking about productivity SaaS platforms here, not generic cloud.

...There's still Netware + Groupwise.

There's still FTP, NFS, SMB, etc...

Hell, there's still Lotus 1-2-3

If you can't get away from Microsoft, it's because you aren't trying. That is what they've counted on, and that's why they've invested as much in terms of trying to have their products taught in schools as early and widely as possible, and why I now refuse to support or teach kids on Office alone when I can teach them on LibreOffice + Office + Google docs instead.

Literacy folks, it's the key to the shackles that vendors have been doing their damnedest to slap on you over the years.

I literally haven’t heard of those two alternatives. Let’s be honest with ourselves. the feature set granted by Microsoft enterprise products, the single pane of glass for managing users and access controls, and the low ops overhead compared to hosting all that stuff yourself (not to mention integrating it in a compelling way that less technically inclined people can understand, and training people up on how to use it), is likely to be an absolutely ridiculous investment.

I doubt you’ll find any company with an IT department with enough resources to roll their own Office 365.

> I literally haven’t heard of those two alternatives.

That's probably because you probably weren't around in the 80s/90s. Netware was a network server tech from before Windows was a thing. All discontinued now so hanging your enterprise off this tech would be a ridiculously bad idea. Seriously, we try to get rid of tech debt, not add it :')

GroupWise still gets some token updates but really. I'm super super happy we moved off Lotus Notes which was in the end a vile piece of unstable stinking java. When it started it was pretty good, sure, but the attempts to keep up with the times made it unstable.

So no worries, they are not serious replacements for today's productivity apps. They were from a time when life and business happened at much lower speeds. When people could wait a few days for a letter to be mailed in.

Try putting a picture in Lotus 1-2-3, connecting to a remote data source, doing a pivot table etc :P Not to mention doing any kind of realtime collaborative work.

> ...There's still Netware + Groupwise.

> There's still FTP, NFS, SMB, etc...

> Hell, there's still Lotus 1-2-3

You're not serious I hope? While these apps have some basic functionality, they would not work in the modern world. Even collaborating has become so much better (remember all the emails in the mid 2000s "CAN WHOEVER HAS OPENED REPORT.XLS PLEASE CLOSE IT SO I CAN EDIT" :). And that was already a huge improvement on the Lotus 1-2-3 days. Now we can seamlessly collaborate on the same document.

Sometimes I'm genuinely surprised we got so much work done then. Things are so much more efficient now.

I used to consider their cloud products secure. When bings home page (plus i don't know how many tenants) was found incorrectly protected a few months ago i stopped. Google will discontinue your product or lock you out. Microsoft will let third parties in . We need better "office" platform vendors.

Google Cloud if you want to live dangerously

Azure if you're a .NET shop and want good integration with Visual Studio

AWS for everyone else

Azure’s salespeople are really good. In reality it’s azure if your cio insists.

Hilariously, Azure PaaS offerings of Microsoft products are notably worse than what is available in AWS.

Examples:

- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) has no Azure PaaS, but there is an AWS PaaS for it.

- RDS for SQL in AWS allows setting a time zone, Azure SQL Database is UTC only, breaking the majority of existing databases when migrated. (They confuse what "developers should do" with what "developers actually do".)

- Azure's PaaS for Active Directory (Azure AD Domain Services) can only be linked to an Azure AD tenant, it can't be used as a standalone authoritative domain. AWS allows this scenario.

Essentially, every Microsoft product you can think of is easier/cheaper/better on AWS instead of Azure.

If Microsoft's CEO was still Bill Gates, heads would have rolled a long time ago.

RDS for SQL Server does have some features missing from Azure SQL Database (SSAS and time zones as you said, but also SSRS). As a PaaS service it's pretty rough around the edges, though: scaling requires a long outage, copying a database between servers requires doing a backup to S3 and restoring from that, and the AWS backup/restore operates on the server level rather than the database level.

Where AWS really showed its unsuitability to host applications on the Microsoft stack was that AWS doesn't have a PaaS way to host .NET Framework web applications; IaaS is the only option.

So both .NET Framework web application nor Microsoft SQL Server database were noticeably harder on AWS than Azure for us. Standing up one IaaS server to host SSRS in Azure was a lot less work than accounting for all the gaps on the AWS side would have been.

Azure SQL database doesn’t support .BAK files. It can only import or export in BACPAC format which is SQL statements in a zip file and is an order of magnitude slower to restore.

We’ve had issues where large databases would take forever to cut over to the PaaS database and cause long outages during migrations.

It’s these random feature gaps that make these platforms difficult to deal with.

BACPACs are the only option to get a database out of Azure SQL. And yes, they do suck, for the reasons you outlined.

For the initial migration to PaaS, whether Azure or AWS RDS, it’s faster and easier to use replication instead of BACPACs.

For moves within the Azure SQL environment, they have database copy functionality that can be utilized. (Which RDS doesn’t have, and I would have sorely missed if we hadn’t pulled the plug on AWA.)

Replication is a breaking schema change, and incompatible with a long list of features and applications.

There's a better way to get data out of Azure if you can handle a bit of manual scripting (way worth if for large tables).

Setup linked-servers from your local server (via Server Objects / Linked servers), once you've done that you can just do "INSERT INTO bigtable(..) SELECT .. FROM [remotename].dbo.bigtable;" , it'll tax the transaction log but it's a magnitude faster than bacpac's,etc. Sadly Azure SQL doesn't support linked servers so one of the servers has to be outside.

>SQL Server...

There's an annoying difference between 'Azure SQL Database' and 'Azure SQL Managed Instance'. I recall the Managed Instance does support timezones and SSAS, while the ordinary offering also misses other useful stuff like Resource Governors.

Managed instance has time zones, but not SSAS. It does have SSIS, but only via Azure Data Factory. This means you need additional VMs and the performance is much worse because there’s always an extra network hop.

> Essentially, every Microsoft product you can think of is easier/cheaper/better on AWS instead of Azure.

This may also explain why in Azure, more cores run a Linux kernel than Microsoft Windows.

I get the sense the old MS is alive and well.

did their reputation ever change from being a company that produces mostly bad quality unreliable software, that is only ever purchased by someone that wion't have to use it on a daily basis?

Teams, Sharepoint, PowerBI, the ad platform that is Windows, Azure

all terrible

(not to mention the ruthless business practices)

did their reputation ever change from being a company that produces mostly bad quality unreliable software, that is only ever purchased by someone that wion't have to use it on a daily basis?

Yes. Especially on HN.

Microsoft used its video game systems and Linux flirtations as Trojan horses to convince a generation of tech-centric people that the bad old Microsoft of yore is just something that old people worry about and that today MS is all rainbows and unicorns.

HN is full of people willing to fall in their swords for MS because they weren't around for its last round of despicable behavior, and bringing it up just means you're out of touch.

VSCode seems like a biggie as well.

Microsoft don't make tens of billions of dollars in revenue every quarter by "convincing people of rainbows and unicorns". Azure didn't pass $100Bn in annual revenue in 2022 by "Trojan horses".

> "HN is full of people willing to fall in their swords for MS because they weren't around for its last round of despicable behavior"

When was this last round? Is HN full of 20 year olds? Microsoft is really popular with the youth of today? That's nearly halfway back to when Microsoft was founded.

How about that Excel thingy?

They went through a period (Windows 7-ish) where they weren't especially bad about anything that I can recall. Pretty stable OS and drivers, Chrome was taking over the Internet and they weren't putting up much of a fuss, they were sort of focused on phones and tablets which didn't cause harm to anyone else in the market.

> ... which didn't cause harm to anyone else in the market.

Not even Apple nor Android. ;)

All brilliant. In the sense "the user of the software is the group, not the individual". All let normal non-technical employees of companies do things in minutes that they can't do at all in the competition.

Where's the news?

Exactly this is going on for at least the last 30 years.

Nowadays they just seem to have better PR / marketing so the usual daily scandal has exactly zero impact on them.

But form the perspective what they're doing, and how they're doing it, nothing ever changed. Microsoft is Microsoft.

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I've read at some point some revealed internal memos or emails from Microsoft, I guess from a court case as the PDF was full of scans of printed out stuff. It was about their internal strategy regarding competition (and actually their "partners" who they count to their competition more or less, only that they see them as a kind of "useful idiots"). Frankly I can't find the PDF right now but it would be really helpful here! It was likely something famous as I wouldn't have downloaded it back than. Who has the right link?

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