I am currently trialing Lecture Streaming via BigBlueButton. So far it works well. If it continues to, I plan to make my teaching set-up Linux only. The only use for MS products left will be Teams for some conferences, but I hope the in-browser version will be good enough.

It is a figure of speech. Obviously, if MS ever had any real "glory", it was only with those without insight. Their products have always sucked. I remember wayyy back getting DR DOS on my first x86 computer and finding it a good product. Then I had do use MS DOS in some other context and found it laughably inferior on all counts.

I think LLM-type AI will eventually deliver that without these people even having to be your enemies.

Looking at the AWS outages and MS problems, it seems this would be an excessively bad idea.

Seems to be the next stage in the road to idiocracy.

There are likely no competent and trustworthy geologists left in Italy.

How utterly incompetent and disconnected do you have to be to still think that DNS "blocking" works?

It seems to have high prevalence, unfortunately.

Yep. Apparently MS thinks they have technology all nicely figured out, when that is not the case at all and they are getting worse and worse.

I will never "chill out" when faced with abject incompetence in the engineering space.

Incidentally, I have been a Linux desktop user for about 30 years now and the "total mess" you see is simply not there.

Sure. But the story is about removing accountability. That is evil. With accountability you can still find that somebody has minor or no real responsibility for something even if they contributed to it. Without accountability, you just let the psychos run wild and that is not acceptable.

I think so too, but it will definitively be interesting to watch.

What amateur level nonsense. Good luck. You can only hope to never face liability.

For me, that is the main complaint. With a good architecture and design, things may still break, but they break in places where you can reasonably expect them to and hence you can prepare. With Windows it is all over the place because they lack that good architecture and design and never understood thinks like KISS, resilience, the Principle of Least Surprise and basically all the things that are required to make engineering good.

Essentially, Windows is a souped-up toy at this time and used for things way outside of what it can do reliably. And the requirements are growing and the gap between what Windows would need to be and what it is is getting larger and larger.

I do agree that many Windows users and basically everybody that decided for Windows (or Microsoft) for a professional application scenario are not professionals by common standards. Of course they do not want to hear that, because nobody wants to hear they are not qualified for their job, especially when that is the only skill they bring to the table. My guess is that the increasing regulation and reliability (at this time spear-headed by the EU) will essentially kill off Windows and other Microsoft products, because they really cannot compete once real quality requirements come into the picture. This may still take 10-20 years to become blatantly obvious, although the LLM mess may accelerate things.

My guess is (and has been for a few years) that MS has entered the "deep organizational dysfunction" phase of its existence. In that phase they are living 100% off old glory and anything new they try just fails or makes things worse, because they are too disconnected and too much without insight to get things to work. *See, for example, their cloud having gotten hacked really badly a number of times by now...)

The next phase is "collapse" and it comes after they have piled up enough technological debt and broken enough old things that still worked somewhat that organizations will have to move off MS stuff in an emergency fashion just to survive. I predict that will happen no later than 20 years from now, but "AI" may have significantly shortened that timeline.