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Comment by Stranger43 | Hacker News Reader

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region.

If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enterprise management features) itself is targeted, and the entire federation of germany changing from ms office formats to odf in practice could set some interesting balls in motions.

But as we have seen this before where a product is started and then sabotaged or delayed by lobbying and inertia from people who dont want to change how theyve always done things, it could be another one-off that dont set a trend.

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sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

Every time my MS rep brings up O365 I correct him: “it’s Office 363. It does not work twice a year”

Does he laugh it off or get offended? I find a good rep walks the line between customer advocate and company "man".

Laughs it off. Except the time I said that to his boss and the Western Europe MS Head Sales. That time he skirted it…

Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

Stupid but genuine question because I never used it.

How does Office 365 work?

Like Office 2007 and such were all MFC/ATL code bases so calling GDI+ and all that.

How does it work now? Canvas and Web assembly etc?

> How does Office 365 work?

I think that depends on which part of "Office 365" you mean: The name itself is, as I understand it, a moniker for pretty much all Office products nowadays, both the "MS Office in the browser" and the "traditional MS Office applications". More of an all-encompassing marketing label than any specific product. So the free-standing MS Word / Excel / Outlook etc I use at work are "Office 365" just as the webpage equivalents I could use in stead (but don't, because they're still pretty massively inferior to the standalone apps).

N.B: "As I understand it"; I could be wrong as Hell.

No clue. But the most painful point is not so much loosing web-based apps (we still have local versions) but Teams, OneDrive and some management tools which are moot if services are down

> sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits).

You could make the argument that cloud solutions are not a prerequisite for collaborative tools like Office 365 or Google Docs, but desktop peer-to-peer systems like those that Groove Networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks) tried to create did not take off.

Hmmm. Compared to Google Docs and Google Drive, Microsoft's collaboration is just bizarre.

Yes, under ideal conditions, teams of people technically could use Microsoft to edit and review documents online at the same time. I have yet to see it in a real world setting. Often times, where I work, we just get confused by OneDrive's links vs direct sharing vs personal onedrive vs sharepoint onedrive. And we end up sharing multiple copies of the same file on Teams which is another source of confusion.

I don't know what you consider ideal conditions, but we do it all the time. It's pretty common for me to be reviewing a document and see the avatars of other people who are simultaneously reviewing and editing it. I've been doing this for years and have yet to have a problem.

Sharing multiple copies of the "same" file is where the problems come in.

There are multiple issues. [1] If you drag/drop or upload the file to Teams, it creates a copy and shares it via Teams SharePoint?

[2] If you look in Teams, some people have automatic permissions because they are in the Team or already have access to the Teams folder. If they are not in the Team, then you have to give "direct access".

[3] For the paranoid, you first go into OneDrive and "manage access". Then you are faced with two choices whose UX is confusing to say the least. One option is to "Copy Link" which has almost the same identical choices as "Share with Specific People". Note that "Share with Specific People" gives you options like "Anyone/doesn't require sign in" and the dialog has a button called "Copy Link". Huh? I thought I was sharing with specific people. I am still unsure who exactly can see the document. Or if the document was shared externally outside of my company.

SHAREPOINT https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-sharepoint-...

ONEDRIVE https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-onedrive-fi...

Below are snippets of MSFT's documentation of what happens when you upload a file to a Teams channel. I BOLDED the confusing parts and added ???.

> All files that you upload, create, or share in Teams can be found in the ONEDRIVE??? icon app on the left side of Teams for desktop.

> Files that you upload to a channel are stored in your team's SHAREPOINT???folder. These files are available in the Files tab at the top of each channel.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/file-storage-in-m...

With Teams, the distinction is pretty easy: Within a Team, the file gets uploaded to the Team's SharePoint site. If you share a file in the Chat module, it gets uploaded to your own OneDrive.

It's clear as in "if you know the rule you can count on it" but there is no discoverability within the tool itself. It will even say if a file has been uploaded into the chat already, giving you an impression that the file is in the chat - while it really is in your own onedrive.

I only discovered it by chance while roaming my onedrive directory.

Confusing to the points where I had (university) students that told me "I _only_ have the file in Excel [and therefore can not share it with you]". That statement confused me until I left academia and was forced to work with MS Office for the first time. Having files in 4 different locations really does not help.

On top of that, Onedrive is the worst of the lot at handling collisions in files. I routinely find that files I work on using two machines in my office (gbit uplink) get garbled. To the point where neither has the latest changes, they’re just gone. Absolutely terrible.

Groove worked amazing until MS bought them out and basically killed them. I've only used it when it was included in Office, but it worked amazingly well. As long as you had at least 1 computer on, it synced pretty reliably. It even worked for Outlook when they were independent but ironical Outlook sync was disabled when they integrated Groove into Office. The next batch of syncing systems were a terrible mess. I think it turned into Sharepoint sync, then decided to go full internet cloud and decided to replace it Foldershare (they bought them about same time they bought Groove), updated it to Livemesh, and killed all that off finalizing with Skydrive which had to be changed to Onedrive. I loved Groove and tried all the iterations but found Dropbox to be hands down the best and have over 30GB free. Unfortunately they only offer 3 free devices now so I might have to go back to Onedrive which had a lot of sync issues last i tried it.

Google's collaberative is probably miles ahead. it's been awhile, I've not used it since I was paying for Japanese lessons.

Collaborative editing in OneNote is hot garbage, leaving you with a mile long list of conflicts. It desperately needs some work.

What's the alternative? Would they be able to do more without cloud office solutions?

Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it.

Would hosting an on-prem alternative yeld better cost and a higher uptime? I doubt it.

The drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled.

It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head and we see actual blocks being mandated on high-security networks against US data harvesting companies(of which MS is but one).

And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?

Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses.

They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra time and effort on alternative office solutions with various degrees of compatibility, just to fight a virtual trade war, will slow then down significantly from their main business goal.

Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution? You think they don't have the technical know-how, or is it because it's not worth the effort and better use what everyone else is already using and focus your resoruces on what really matters?

If the entities you depends on for funding migrate from Words to LibreOffice, then yes, you will consider moving as well.

The network effect may be mostly considered in regard to social media, but it is just as powerful when it come to tools and file format.

Administrations moving en-mass to open-sourced software would ensure a significant chunk of companies would follow.

This is precisely why Microsoft freaked out when Germany last tried this. It led to them inventing this nebulous "TCO" concept wherein they massively overestimated the costs surrounding moving to FOSS in order to try and convince clueless managerial stakeholders to stick with them.

To be fair in certain cases the cost might be very high and considerably higher than whatever the license/subscription fees paid to MS are. e.g. Libre Office doesn’t really have a drop-in replacement for Excel (for non trivial use cases. To be fair it still might be sufficient for the majority of users, but that would mean that some proportion of your workforce has to stay on Excel/Office which kind of beats the whole purpose).

To be equally fair, in certain cases the non-licensing costs of Microsoft software are higher than the FOSS equivalent.

In fact, I'd argue that in some cases these are higher. A good example of this is that piece of shit that is Microsoft Teams - both the horrid security flaws and the ways it keeps breaking. I've used FOSS equivalents and they have a smaller attack surface and are more reliable.

They also play all sorts of user-hostile tricks that make vendor lock in possible, and this often has an underappreciated impact on delivery.

Vendor lockin is no excuse leaking PI to MS though. You could buy some Office 2003 CD and use Excel locally.

Uh using an out of date and unsupported Excel version is a really bad idea. Lots of security vulnerabilities around VB scripting/macros which gives you the very real risk of being compromised by a malicious spreadsheet.

Better to just switch where you can and invest resources into improving FOSS offerings to handle the use cases it currently can’t.

Executing malicious code on your computer is a problem, ye.

If you want to give the users a nice programming environment you can't also prevent them from doing arbitrary computations.

You can run Excel in a VM if you want.

Medical researchers in many places leak non-anonymized sensitive patient data to MS, even when they know better and that's one of the reasons Office LTSC exists

> Vendor lockin

That, but also lack of feature parity. Unfortunately Libre Office is just not very good

> It led to them inventing this nebulous "TCO" concept

Source? Is that phrase really a Microsoft invention?

You don't need everyone switching over. Let's say that by next year, a total of 10% of orgs in the EU are using LibreOffice, and then Redmond is hit by a comet. It'd be painful for the other 90% to switch but there would be some familiarity with the process, whereas if there's an MS monoculture then it would take a whole lot longer and be a lot messier.

You just do it like USA does: if you want to do business with the public sector, you must not rely on a foreign cloud.

What are the alternatives. Like, really. I get it: Hetzner and OVH exist. But what are the alternatives to AWS, GCP, Azure?

As someone who split his time 50/50 between AWS and vmware based instances, i cant really think of anything we run in AWS that is not eventually supposed to go back on prem when we have stabilized the specification and lifecycle expectations. And who could not have gone in on prem if we had been willing to spend capex upfront(which would likely had led to lower lifecycle costs).

The last time this debate came along ms was able to sweep in with an solution that did not require cloud integration with an price/support package that was by all estimate at bellow cost, and i would be surprised if the state in question have anything in the cloud that MS did not use to offer as on-prem solutions, and im pretty sure the current wintel/mso solution is based around those on-prem implementation of AD and SharePoint that no longer exists and viable alternatives to opensource based document storage repositories.

> i cant really think of anything we run in AWS that is not eventually supposed to go back on prem

Hod do you handle multi-DC, multi-AZ resilience? What are you using instead of IAM policies that cover every resource?

(Asking unironically, would just like to know. I worked at cloud-centric companies for last 15 years or so.)

I guess the same as people have always done. You have more server rooms on ideally different networks and grids. That can be a rented room/ rack in a bigger DC, your own if you have a big factory with subsidiaries etc.

The IAM etc. will probably done by a combination of technical on organizational measures. You will have certain people doing certain things at least before the solution is ready for IaC. People will create roles, accounts, accesses and such. With networking gear that can be still tricky to implement, with virtualization solutions that is easier today. For databases etc. you can create accounts in them too. Of course, K8s and similar make these things more formalized/ transferable. However there is a lot of stuff before you can deploy that.

People forget however that even if you have hundreds of servers you are tiny compared to the cloud providers. You don't have to have the same breadth and depth of offering. So while you need more baby sitting of hardware, probably will not get nearly as good deals on hardware as the big providers do, you will save their considerable margins. Also, they actually have some of the same expenses too - if a harddrive goes bad they will still swap them basically the same as you do. Big cloud providers will not get substantially different energy pricing than what e.g. a steel foundry would get.

By hosting things on premise or in a nearby datacenter(s) you can shave off a lot of latency too. Some machinery likes to store a lot of data and shaving off latency will decrease your need for thick router buffers because you will not have such a big Bandwidth Delay Product and will achieve the same speeds with much smaller buffers. Building stuff on premise just for you makes some things easier too. Even if you loose some credentials usually you can just hard-reset the equipment as the last resort. There will be no credit card blocking that would affect the operations. If you are less strict with security it will usually matter much less - you are not sharing the hardware with unknown parties and all people that touch it have a contract with the company. So usually everybody want the company to succeed to get the paycheck. You build a deeper know how and can do some optimizations the cloud providers cannot do because you don't have to be general.

Thanks, this makes sense!

I mostly thought about the software infrastructure side. With thousands and even mere hundreds of servers over several locations you already want some uniformity. Would you run k8s? Nomad + Consul? MinIO or Ceph? MySQL + Galera? Would OwnCloud scale to many hundreds of users? How would you unify or integrate access control to all that?

Nothing unsurmountable here, just interesting how it's done in real big on-prem installations.

Well, hundreds or thousands of servers can probably be still managed by Ansible with Fabric, Puppet, Chef etc. I don't think focusing too much on the technologies used is useful when planning the overall approach. Most companies could probably consolidate all the critical hardware to 2-3 racks of equipment if they tried nowadays with HA and everything. Hardware is just really powerful and having less of it makes everything else further up usually simpler.

What I would run depends on the particular customer I would have. I probably wouldn't try to unify or integrate access control much. You are not trying to build another public cloud, you want to develop and deploy applications with reasonable robustness in comparison to the cost and benefit of the solution.

Real on-premise installations usually are a mix of open and proprietary technologies. Many companies probably have a few Windows Server file servers on top of VMware vSAN or some kind of EMC2/ NetApp/ HPE 3PAR or whatever storage with HA capability. There is no S3 compatible storage and all the data is stored on the network drive and referenced in some MSSQL database or stored directly in it. If MSSQL or Oracle is used, they probably run on local storage and have are part of a cluster that are marked such that they are never on the same physical node. You can do similar things with Proxmox, GNU/ Linux and PostgreSQL too with a little more effort. You can run MinIO or Garage for S3 if you want to be cool or buy a supported Ceph installation from e.g. SUSE. Everything will be more rudimentary and half automatic but still a few people will be able to manage that even on a rather large scale without many issues. Of course, if you have bigger needs, there are companies you can by computers from by the rack. Some will offer you a complete cloud management stack with it. It can be Oxide Computers (their own stack), or Cloud&Heat in Germany for instance (that is built on OpenStack). There are so many options.

For AWS we rely almost entirely on backup/restore and database level log shipping on prem this is is in some cases argumented by storage level(netapp and previously hpe 3par) replication but this is going away for cost reasons.

Given that my experience with AWS is to use the same application level cross region resilience techniques im used to on prem(i have worked with high end unix boxen most of my carear) im genuinely baffled when people start talking about cloud resilience as something magical, and nearly all our traffic happens inside of an private network(MPLS/VPN) that stretches across the different sites.

I really haven't seen any magic multi-az resiliiance in aws that dont have an onprem counter part.

None of this is in house whitebox hardware but relatively standard solutions from established vendors(VMware recently started abusing their near monopoly so everyone is looking for/at alternatives like proxmox, xen and nutanix but arent ready to move just yet).

Thanks! Certainly multi-AZ setups are not magical. I just wanted to know how it's now done on-prem, what are the tools, solutions, approaches. Doing this in a cost-effective way for 1000 servers likely takes different tools than doing this at a major cloud provider scale.

One thing that's more "magical" in AWS is S3. Their architecture is impressive, see e.g. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2021/04/s3-strong-consi...

Many users don't need multi-DC, multi-AZ resilience. Having a good (and tested) DR plan might be enough.

This is correct. The original comment was about having basically anything AWS has to offer run on-prem, assuming that these things are actually needed.

Scaleway is a great alternative to AWS. A lot cheaper too! And API compatible.

Thanks, looks interesting.

I guess MS could just find a way to guarantee that any data is only stored in data centers in Europe. It shouldn’t be too complicated and I don’t see how could they be considered to be a foreign cloud then.

Can the US government still force them to violate that guarantee? If yes, then they're a foreign cloud.

But then that would apply to every company that has datacenters and provides services both in US and Europe?

I don't think so. The US government could kill Microsoft; no European government could. The EU / some European government could kill a European company; the US couldn't.

openstack

No. OpenStack sucks to deploy and maintain with the result being an inferior cloud with a lack in services.

The goal is not "superior", the goal is "USA can't kill our infrastructure pressing one button"

The goal is also to have a usable cloud on which you can efficiently develop software.

Otherwise we can simply go back to paper.

The initial premise is wrong for a start.

You don't need a cloud to efficiently develop software. I've worked in companies that were running kubernetes on prem. It was a PITA for kubernetes ops but from a developer perspective it wasn't much different than using the cloud in a large company.

Cloud is very flexible for very small orgs that have little processes but once you get into a certain size with lots of processes, privileges separations and nomenclatures, it becomes so bureaucratic all flexibility of a cloud mostly disappear.

> You don't need a cloud to efficiently develop software. I've worked in companies that were running kubernetes on prem. It was a PITA for kubernetes ops but from a developer perspective it wasn't much different than using the cloud in a large company.

EC2 servers and Kubernetes are a very small part of what is necessary to run complex applications.

> Cloud is very flexible for very small orgs that have little processes but once you get into a certain size with lots of processes, privileges separations and nomenclatures, it becomes so bureaucratic all flexibility of a cloud mostly disappear.

That will be the same in any large company.

Friends working at banks have to make formal requests for new versions of Python that months to be accepted.

If anything, clouds can be much more flexible thanks to tools like CDK which bare-metal or OpenStack don't offer.

>Friends working at banks have to make formal requests for new versions of Python that months to be accepted.

And I have been asked by my manager to help a different team and I am still waiting 10 days later to get access to the necessary AWS account.

These kinds of problems are organizational, not technical. Thinking cloud solutions solve organizational issues magically is naive and delusional.

> These kinds of problems are organizational, not technical. Thinking cloud solutions solve organizational issues magically is naive and delusional.

We actually agree on this point.

Using OpenStack is actually not a silver bullet and won't solve this problem. This is an organisational problem.

So my point still stands that OpenStack is lacking in services and is not fit for complex applications if you do not want to reinvent the wheel every day.

okay

> You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?

I don't think they will stop, but they will become much more hesitant.

Concerning your other points: it is of similar economic importance for the company to invest in precautions to prevent that you are taken hostage of, in this case by Microsoft. Thus such measures are actually often in the company's self-interest in opposite to fighting a virtual trade war for someone else.

> And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?

Well... yes, I think that's exactly the argument being made here. Reliance on foreign cloud infrastructure is a liability, and the US does not hold any of its companies accountable for blatantly unethical and reckless data practices.

I'll admit LibreOffice is relatively underpowered and unintuitive, but I've been using it for years and I find the compatibility issues to be overblown. I'd hazard a bet that most employees of companies using MS Office could make the switch and be used to it within a couple weeks. Certainly a much, MUCH easier transition than one between ERPs, for example.

> Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution?

SAP can be hosted entirely onsite, and at Google's scale that's almost certainly what they're doing. The problem is the infrastructure, not the origin of the software itself. Note how the EU never had anything against MS Exchange Servers.

Of course. Same thing will all those environmental laws shenanigans.

Companies are better off investing in short-term gains and leave the governments taking care of the environment and digital accountability of its citizens.

If the alternative is not getting the security certifications required to operate legally in the sectors they depend on for revenue what alternative does an organization really have to seeking/implementation solutions in sync with the mandated regulations.

And this is not an private company whose demise is insignificant to the society at large(as all companies must be in an functional capitalist economy) but the government itself instituting policies to protect itself from dependence on a single foreign company.

And being told by an court to get off the o365 cloud is not an theoretical prospect for an European governmental organization as the EU commission found out about a month ago(https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre...).

There's also this: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2019/06/11... from 2019.

Governments can take a longer and more strategic outlook than private enterprises. It's not even primarily about nationalistic trade wars: I want my tax euros to fund as little closed-source software as possible. It's crazy how much money even just our schools spend for software that can't be freely redistributed or modified. That said, I'm not holding my breath regarding the success of this most recent move.

I mean, even aside that? If you spend the money on European developers instead, that's jobs and tax dollars here.

> And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?

Most workers in most companies probably don't really need an entire Office suite. It is just they use Outlook and from time to time open a Word document that could've been a PDF or HTML form if they had better processes. For the same reason, most people don't really need to use Windows. However people use Windows, because a lot of "professional" software only ships for it and nobody is going to rewrite an app that the enterprise uses for the last 20 years to prevent the use of Windows or some of its particular version. If it was that easy, why would Windows XP or Windows 7 be still so wide-spread?

> Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses.

The problem is, many programs in the Office suite don't just work. Being an admin in a larger organization you will face a broken .pst file basically every week. 10+ GB of emails seems to be a problem also considering the search speed etc. The level of engineering incompetence behind Outlook is high. It even has special conditional HTML just so Outlook renders some things correctly, because Microsoft is long term incapable of implementing a web engine to a degree that they had to adopt and adapt a competitors product (Chromium). Similarly for Excel. Most things that are in Excel shouldn't be and instead should be a table + some app in a database or a form + database backend. We have seen that during COVID-19, when essential health data was messed up because of wrong use of Excel but also because Excel just wasn't the right tool for the job frankly. We have been renaming genes or whatever, because Excel has insufficient auto-formatting algorithms and people have to learn how to prevent this - which is proof it doesn't "Just Work" for people.

> They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra time and effort on alternative office solutions with various degrees of compatibility, just to fight a virtual trade war, will slow then down significantly from their main business goal.

Most things in most companies should be formalized in digital forms backed by some processing backend. Most companies just are not very good at management therefore they fill these gaps by using more flexible tools where everybody can unfold their creativity generally making a mess making any kind of formalization much harder later on.

No question there are also jobs where you need that flexibility, e.g. where you get data from people precisely in these formats and are expected to produce output in these formats for them too. Because people are generally opposed to change and don't want to learn, if they can avoid it. Much better tools are available for so many activities yet people usually opt for a product out of the Office suite.

> Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution? You think they don't have the technical know-how, or is it because it's not worth the effort and better use what everyone else is already using and focus your resoruces on what really matters?

Because promotions are easier to get if you work on a product that makes money for the company (such as search + ads) or is a big cost center and a needed pre-condition for the business (such as the cloud infrastructure) and you can implement changes that safe the company a lot of money. However, don't underestimate how much SAP was customized for Google. It could be that SAP is just the core of a much bigger system.

> Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it

How long ago are we talking? I was sharing files with coworkers on a shared network drive 20 years ago. I could send files via IM as well back then.

Listening to people talk about the 00s like we barely invented fire is something else. There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. The cloud is someone's mainframe and we moved away from those for the same reason why government wants to leave the cloud.

Agreed. A lot of "new tech" are just cloud versions of what used to be on-premise services.

> There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented.

Now there's a hot take!

I suppose for this assertion to work, you'd have to consider Arpanet orders-of-magnitude more sophisticated an advancement than modern gaming, blockchain, VR, LLMs with fully integrated real-time image processing... all just minor increments?

There's been very little actually useful new in computing since the arpanet was invented.

None of the shit you mentioned is a counterexample to that.

HTH!

You mean emailing .doc files around to co-workers, like what happened yesterday?

Nowadays they mail .docx around, haven't seen a .doc in a long time. I'm a software dev on Linux and haven't even LibreOffice installed. I tell the sender to please send it to me as .pdf. I write docs in markdown on GitHub (the company I work for uses GitHub, make of it what you will).

PDF is easy to read. It's a ridiculous document format for the purpose of internal sharing and reading, but it still works well for that purpose.

But PDF is not really optimized for editing or collaboration, and the tools available on Linux especially are limited.

I like PDFs when I trust them, but I’m always a bit wary receiving them from random people. Don’t they support embedded scripting?

I’d like a format that is like PDF, but markup only.

Well, my viewer doesn't support embedded scripting. :D

When did people stop doing that? Last time I checked (which was our soc2 audit last year) most people didn't understand the sharing/collaborative features of sharepoint/office365 and were still doing it.

I live in a badly-maintained, "3rd world" country, and since we got office 365 maybe a half decade ago (probably more) it's been down once, for one afternoon. And that was due to what looks like an undersea cable sabotage.

What kind of internet/IT department do you have where you have any sort of regular office outage?

Recently we had a Teams outage at work that wasn't AWFULLY disruptive, but the only reason that is is that we don't depend on 365 cloud services to get anything done. We use Slack for chat features and more casual calling services (non-meeting) though of course Teams managed to be down on a meeting-heavy day, and we ended up organizing Slack huddles to get around it.

The only real cloud service we use is OneDrive and the CEO is pushing us to get away from it because it has all kinds of strange problems with file permissions and we constantly have to call IT to unlock files.

What alternative tool does your CEO prefer?

https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status just scrolling through there is several outages, Teams, performance issues, etc. However it does tend to be only a specific area/country or a set of products rather then all of Office 365.

Is Office365 really down that often? I'm fortunate enough to not have to use it but I don't hear any complaints from my colleagues that do.

The fact that it would even go down and it requires online connection to vacuum up my data is such a bananas level oversight from MS. That company, man, that company.

Does it? I thought local installs still function offline for up to 48 hours, as long as you haven't passed the last synced expiry date?

At least, that's how it used to function way back when I used it and had a not-always-online connection.

It doesn’t. These guys are probably still upset about the ribbon.

Microsoft is not my favorite company. But the only reason O365 has been down for days is when customer integrations (identity, security stuff, VPN rules, etc) break. That was even true in the early days before 365 branding. Source: I’ve been accountable for 250k+ user O365 environments as a customer director or VP for over a decade.

Really? Or did that not make its way up the chain of command? None of your 250k+ accounts had issues because they didn't connect to the internet? What about license renewals - did anyone get shut out of their account immediately because they missed a license renewal date and happy to be off the internet?

Looks like 40 in a decade.

Offline use cases don’t use O365.

> These guys are probably still upset about the ribbon.

Yeah, so? Why shouldn't one be?

They better never have Monday outages then.

I use O365 all day across two orgs and have done for about 5 years. Never had a problem. Not once!

I figured the stated move to open source was a bluff to get a lower license cost.

I could swear this has happened before…

Yeah last time with Munich they moved back to MS after MS just so happened to move their HQ to that state.

Microsoft is clearly keen to avoid this becoming a thing. If governments can shift successfully then so can businesses

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...

The link is just about a move from one part of Munich to another (MS German HQ has always been in Munich). From what I remember it was more that we had a coalition with the CSU for four years and unsurprisingly, the moment conservatives were part of the cities government all went back to "help the companies".

(MS had tried to pressure against the move from the start, but wasn't really successful in the first years)

The problem was mostly that the only guy that was really backing the project (Christian Ude, SPD), was replaced with his successor (Dieter Reiter, SPD) who just didn't have the drive necessary to maintain the project.

The entire design of "LiMux" was doomed from the start: it was a highly customized version of Ubuntu that was only used in Munich (not even throughout the entire state). That made everything ridiculously expensive since the actual advantages of building on an open source solution was never realized. That is combined with the fact that "open source" and "cost savings" were used interchangeably when in reality the budget for Windows should have been pre-allocated into development, rather than cut.

The entire project was half-assed to begin with, which basically meant that Windows and Linux had to coexist since many crucial tools were never ported to Linux.

The "Microsoft killed it" story sounds realistic, but the truth is the much more boring incompetence in execution.

I've no doubt that there was incompetence involved. Which is to be somewhat expected since Linux requires a set of skills to install and administer at scale, and few people have that particular skillset.

Equally I'm sure it was never going to be a cost saving exercise since firstly the cost of Windows is negligible, and second the conversion costs, in-house skill requirements, re-training of users, and porting existing software are all significant.

So you go from cheap software to free software, but from cheap IT staff to expensive, perhaps-incompetant, hard-to-replace IT staff.

If the savings aren't real then the fallback argument is privacy etc. But Libre Office runs fine on Windows. So by all means start there.

They always stated that it won't be cheaper. That was not the intention.

The main point was that Munich saw an opportunity to leave a monopoly for an option with competition. When the LiMux decision was made Munich had to change their whole IT landscape anyway (They ran on NT4 and even extended support was running out / getting extremely costly), so they thought: If we have to change anyway, why not change for something where we have more options?

Having more options, in and of itself, has no value. Leaving a monopoly to go to an alternative option in itself has no value. Plus of course, since they decided to basically build their own option, they did neither.

Firstly, the number of options argument. Choosing between lots of options, over choosing the best option, isn't some intrinsic good. I don't support say football over Formula 1 because there are more teams. I choose one over the other based on which sport I prefer to watch.

Going the Linux route "because there are more distributions to choose from" is a dumb argument if Windows is the best OS for your organisation. [1].

Equally, you may decide that you'd prefer to foster competition. You might decide that it's worth subsidising competition just to have competition. You acknowledge you're making an inferior choice, but the are unaccounted upsides to others having that choice.

But govt adoption of Linux (especially creating your own distribution) does little to nurture competition. Munich didn't spend its budget improving Linux. They spent the budget implementing it.

There are reasons Windows and Office dominate the desktop, especially in large scale environments. You may not like MS, but that doesn't negate those reasons. If you make a choice to forge a different road because you don't like MS then you'd better be very clear on what those reasons are, and what challenges and costs you are likely to face. Because if you aren't, then earn those challenges and costs come up it's hard to wave them away.

I'm not saying all this to rag on Linux or OSS, or to say its impossible to run Linux etc. As per the GP, there are companies that have made a choice, that hire people with the right skills, that make it work.

But thinking that rolling out Linux at enterprise level is easy, or cheaper, or has better desktop options, or runs more bespoke software, or is easier to get good desktop software for , or is easier (cheaper) to buy hardware for, is wrong. And that wrongness will lead to project failure. And those failures don't help Linux, arguably they hurt it.

> The link is just about a move from one part of Munich to another (MS German HQ has always been in Munich).

Nope. They moved from Unterschleißheim (administrative district of Munich in Upper Bavaria) to Schwabing (district of Munich town), which tax-paying wise makes the difference.

Embarrassing. I really thought we had incorporated Unterschleißheim into Munich ages ago. And I live here .. oh well. Thanks for the correction!

That wasn't a correction; you were right to begin with. If it's so much a part of the city that you don't even know if it's formally part of the city or not... Then it's part of the city.

Fuck, it seems (from Google Maps) to be about half as far from the center of Munich as the Munich Airport. If schitt that far out is called "Munich", then so is Unterschleissheim.

I remember that one... In the end the harsh truth for MS is that a guesstimate of 99% of all offices and administration users are using and, most of all, only need 1% of the features Office (including Excel) do offer.

The other harsh truth is that those using more advanced features are typically creating spreadsheets full of errors and bugs, which should be better rewritten in dedicated apps.

The world is using MS Office but the world really doesn't need that turd.

I ve both ported an Excel spreadsheet to dedicated app and helped SMEs move everything to Google workspace.

Fuck MS Office.

> The other harsh truth is that those using more advanced features are typically creating spreadsheets full of errors and bugs, which should be better rewritten in dedicated apps.

My experience has been the mirror opposite. I’m doing finance/accounting day to day but can also code. The attempts to replace excel with custom apps were consistently absolute horror shows full of consultants, endless meetings, coders not understanding finance nuances, endless parallel running, budget overruns. And then months and a couple of 100k spent later all to duplicate a spreadsheet someone had originally slapped together in a day or two.

Not wildly attached to excel but now actively steer clear from custom app projects due to career risk of being in proximity of these.

It’s the same as big SAP projects once the “customizations” start. The implementing teams incentives are the precise opposite of the business. Bill as much as possible, extend project timeline, add more features and widgets, make things seem more complicated than they need to be, pull users away from their work to test, cater to the execs with dashboard instead of the team in trenches, endless CYA processes camouflaged as “end user acceptance”, office politics shenanigans to promote the solution etc. I’d much rather debug & streamline a spreadsheet than deal with all that.

I do agree that spreadsheets tend towards chaos as complexity increases though…

> The attempts to replace excel with custom apps were consistently absolute horror shows full of consultants, endless meetings, coders not understanding finance nuances, endless parallel running, budget overruns. And then months and a couple of 100k spent later all to duplicate a spreadsheet someone had originally slapped together in a day or two.

"Modern Web Apps", based on "The Modern Data Stack", and so on...?

Give the spreadsheets (and access to two or three of the people who made and use them!) to one or two guy[s] with Delphi, and you'll have an old-fashioned client-server app -- which isn't a bad thing; it's what you want in contexts like this -- in a week or less. For the first one; the following ones are faster.

Do the americans exclusively use MS Office in government computers?

America is a very big place with federal, state, city standards. I'm not sure it is possible to say "exclusively" about anything.

That said, I've been in the IT world for 3 decades and I haven't worked for/with a government agency that used anything other than MS Office since the WordPerfect and Lotus 123 days.

What do you mean by "exclusively" and "government"? Outside of the DoD/US Military (where hardened Linux has quite a few uses), I'm pretty sure the US Federal govt is fairly Microsoft-centric as they offer them the guarantees and concessions needed to sign contracts. It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direct point of contact with strict SLA guarantees to get things fixed and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance.

Local and state govts usually follow suit, as it makes sense that what works for the Fed will work for them. But I've seen plenty of open source softwares being used in various municipal and state offices. LibreOffice and CentOS would probably be the most common alternatives.

So, to answer your question, no it's not exclusively Windows. It's almost exclusively Windows in the Federal govt as there are mandates there, but otherwise it's a hodgepodge of what works/can be afforded throughout all other levels of govt.

> It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direct point of contact with strict SLA guarantees to get things fixed

Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software?

> and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance.

That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source? If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?

> Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software?

Gotta love how internet commentators feel like picking a statement apart in isolation somehow validates their point.

Yes, they offer SLAs and have full control of their software and its release cycle. So can offer guarantees and stand by them.

> That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source?

"They" is Microsoft.

> If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?

It means they don't have to wait for Linux (or a plethora of other open source softwares) for upstreaming or need to fork / manage an independent branch. It means that they aren't at the whims of a community who decides to abandon projects willy-nilly or replace them with brand new implementations at the drop of a hat. Or commercial entities built on top of those projects that can only offer surface level guarantees.

No one here is saying Windows (or proprietary software) is intrinsically better. What they're saying is that what Microsoft offers to certain large-scale/enterprise entities is clearly better.

If you disagree, have at it. I don't care. The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.

> It means that they aren't at the whims of a community who decides to abandon projects willy-nilly or replace them with brand new implementations at the drop of a hat.

Yeah, because only the Open Source community ever does that. Corporations never do... /s

(The "Google Graveyard" site is famous, but wasn't there one for Microsoft too? I want my Microsoft Bob to be maintained, dammit!)

ETA:

> The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.

...that they're idiots. That's what you meant, right?

You forgot to quote this part:

> Gotta love how internet commentators feel like picking a statement apart in isolation somehow validates their point.

I hadn't made any other point before that, had I? That isolated bit was my entire point.

Yes. Most schools too. Microsoft has incredible political power here.

Even after CISA's review of the summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange online intrusion?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929246

The phrase is, "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft." It's descended from the same phrase, applied to IBM, when they were the power.

But the impact is deeper nowadays.

What was the worst that could happen when you bought IBM back then?

I think the sentiment is less that something catastophic can't happen by depending on M$ - it's more that you personally will never be blamed for their servers going down. Whereas if you advocate for a smaller/more open solution and that blows up in the company's face, it's your ass on the line.

But that could change after the last couple of mistakes by MS.

Do maybe it's still in the head of the people but it could backfire.

There's stories like this for every big vendor. This rarely has any impact.

Not as much as it used to be, now that they can do most of what they need with Google's free apps

It's reasonable. What would be strange is that they relied on Chinese or Russian software to run their government. That's sort of what we, the Europeans, do when we use Microsoft tech in our governments.

Not just Americans. MS Office is the standard (at least) in the western world.

I hope they set aside some budget/resources to contribute back to the open source ecosystem

They already do at least a bit :)

https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/

I feel like I've seen this very headline before in Germany specifically several times over the years, like I keep hearing that Germany is using LibreOffice/OpenOffice.

Googling to try to confirm this, I see that OpenOffice began when a program called StarOffice was open-sourced, and StarOffice was originally a German product most popular in Germany, so that could be part of German interest in OpenOffice descendents specifically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History

And here's an article that may be what I was thinking of -- but turns out it was about Munich specifically. That has a history of saying it was going to switch to OpenOffice as far back as 2003, that not working out for them, then trying again...

2020: Linux not Windows: Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source – again: Munich's flip-flop back to open source is the latest sign of Germany's political sea change over proprietary software.

> However, the decision by the new coalition administration in Germany's third largest and one of its wealthiest cities is just the latest twist in a saga that began over 15 years ago in 2003, spurred by Microsoft's plans to end support for Windows NT 4.0.

> Because the city needed to find a replacement for aging Microsoft Windows workstations, Munich eventually began the move away from proprietary software at the end of 2006.

— https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

And here's a history of Berlin announcing/trying but not getting approval....

> It is the second time the opposition Greens had proposed switching Berlin's 68,000 workstations to open source software, and the second time they failed, said Thomas Birk, the party's spokesman for government modernization, on Wednesday. The earlier effort was in 2007.

Oh boy, which also mentions:

> Not every migration works though. The city of Freiburg announced in November it would dump OpenOffice and go back to Microsoft because of functionality problems due to a failed migration.

— https://www.infoworld.com/article/2611066/berlin-won-t-migra...

So yeah, German localities kind of have a history of trying this out without it actually leading to a sea change, although this one may be larger/at the state level instead of just city/etc. (Although I guess it's wrong to say this hasn't led to a trend -- its' an existing German trend of local governments trying to switch, without it necessarily working out!)

> although this one may be larger/at the state level instead of just city/etc.

I think that, like in the USA, some German states (Bundesländer) are smaller than some German cities.

15 years ago. It was big news then. Germany has always had a rocky relationship with USA software.... Remember when Lotus.... software could not be exported from the USA because the encryption was considered a weapon of mass destruction?

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL6E8F276E/

You are spot on. I was just having the same argument with the recent news.... Thinking this is old news

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