They own 27% of OpenAI. I don't think that having all of them swap to ChatGPT is necessarily going to have the effect you're hoping.

Plus, I guess there are office 365 outages, but the outage I personally hear more chatter about is the hosted exchange services (outlook), you will still need an email server in a post ai world, right?

However, leaders are advised by their underlings, who are swayed by their technical officers, who are charmed by the commercial arm of corporations.

The only effective path to actual change is to charm the technical officers with a product that is strictly superior in the metrics they care about. They'll then work their way up the chain.

There are exabytes of documents in Microsoft formats that can be at best "read" with a significant level of data corruption in other products (formatting errors). Writing them back out with shredding them is hit & miss at best. Entire MS products have no equivalent at all that can open their file formats, such as MS Access and Power BI.

Word isn't just paragraphs, italic, and bold.

Excel has features you probably have never even heard of, but people use at scale. Things like tabular data connections using OData. It's the front-end for SQL Server Analysis Services. It has the Mashup columnar engine from Power BI built in to it. Etc, etc, etc.

These things are massive products, with deep integrations across each other, third-party software, third-party plugins, cloud products, and on and on.

There's easily several million man-years of effort sunk into the Microsoft Office ecosystem.

Switching costs are not a matter of failing to "somehow convince" people to switch.

The switching costs are on the order of trillions of dollars, not a decision to be taken lightly.

Here's some critical points everybody normally ignores in these discussion:

1) Partial switching doesn't help, because now you have two problems!

2) Everyone else has to switch too. Google Workspace people were laughing during the Outlook outage, eeeeexcept... they couldn't send or receive emails either -- because their business partners, vendors, and customers likely used Outlook.

3) The alternative with the same features, same level of integration, same commercial support, etc... is the same thing, with the same problems, but just a different brand.

You can't escape the reality of this, it is what it is, there's no nirvana that we could all achieve if we "just" did something "simple".

What does AI have to do with it? Are you proposing that we replace Excel for accounting purposes with something vibecoded? That sounds a bit nuts to me. You can pay a bit of money for mature software that will probably not fail to add 2 + 2 correctly and will not run away with your wife, so why give that up?

I actually suspect that companies such as Microsoft pushing for AI everywhere may undermine that proposition... but then, the alternative is probably LibreOffice Calc, which is eminently boring and doesn't have Copilot popping up.

Also: No home-grown CRM will have, in the long run, uptimes anywhere approaching e.g. Office365. You're just smearing one large outage into a lot more small ones, plus a few data losses.

That rent buys you something. The internal development buys you something very different. You might want to make a reasoned call on what you're buying instead of making GDP predictions.

But the tools we have to do this suck. We don't have much beyond "here's the source code as text, look at it, and think really hard".

Another comment[0] suggested having AI generate "code walks" through the code. This seems better than our current approach of "my PR contains a diff, good luck".

I'm working on a tool in Emacs that allows me to mark certain lines, or entire projects, as needing review, and then helps me track which parts have been reviewed. I need something to help me find parts of the code I have never reviewed before.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50410493

Like if Exchange Online went down for an hour every Sunday for maintenance, and they made their network configuration change then, there would have been no cascading failure.

Exceedingly simple: those who decide don't know better.

There's only warm fuzzies for helping fix or find OSS but the drive for resilient systems hasn't died.

Other bits of the stack are fine. It's not a flat world.

"The team had reached a point where it was too risky to make any code refactoring or engineering improvements. I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242

Right?

As opposed to a pile of unmaintainable shit

Now they have an outage that should honestly result in people going to prison, at some point we have to question leadership's ability to... well lead because unless something drastically changes I don't think society wants to deal with a massive transnational trillion+ corporation with various monopolies that controls many aspects of our lives if they're going to continue to give us shit service.

This is why agents discovering vulns en masse is pretty great in the long run, it gets ahead of these sort of malicious hoarding shitheads with more resources than ethics.

It's clear from the wording of the updates that Microsoft took the better part of a day to even figure out what was happening, and that they're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, instead of following the kind of precise recovery plan that they would have had, had they understood their own systems.

What do you expect amz to do about the drone strikes haha.

if you absolutely needed your servers in an active war zone for some reason cant imagine you'd have five 9s either