[bezelbuttons]

> Adair said he’s fielded dozens of calls today from state and local government agencies that have identified the backdoors in their Exchange servers and are pleading for help.

I can imagine they are sending an email to [e-mail] pleading for help. A future attacker would be well served to deny email to be sent to any mailbox @microsoft.com

EDIT: I'm now realizing that this follows the Microsoft-angle of the Solarwinds' attack. These customers are not going to be happy with $MS

[mschuster91]

> EDIT: I'm now realizing that this follows the Microsoft-angle of the Solarwinds' attack. These customers are not going to be happy with $MS

Won't hurt MS in the long run. There is no viable alternative to switch to, for any of their products:

* OS: macOS runs only on expensive Apple hardware, Linux can't run business software, plus both have retraining costs for employees

* Office software: Libreoffice just... doesn't cut it, let's be honest. Apple's stuff only runs on Macs.

* Exchange: Lotus Notes is dead, and while there are open source solutions, there is no comprehensive single solution.

[crazygringo]

The viable alternative is Google Workspace.

At most companies, a small percentage of employees will still need Excel for really complex/large spreadsheets, or Word for complex formatting destined for publication. But for 95% of people Google's good enough or better.

Year after year, Google keeps stealing more of Microsoft's customers, and it's extremely common for new companies to adopt Google rather than Microsoft.

[judge2020]

It seems MS is winning in the Education space - the existing mindshare for MS Office means it's hard to accept free Google Workspace and the learning curve that might come from that vs. M365 with the free desktop Office licenses they give out to every student and teacher.

[sangnoir]

> It seems MS is winning in the Education space

Which country, and what level of education? In the US, cheap Chromebooks with GSuite have taken over K-12

[fh973]

Germany. Since Corona, Teams is suddenly everywhere.

[roody15]

Google is absolutely dominating the K-12 education market.

[ahepp]

I would think tertiary matters a lot more than k-12

[arcturus17]

I’d agree, as it is one step closer to the labor market, and Enterprise is the goose with the golden eggs. But is Microsoft really dominant in tertiary?

[ocdtrekkie]

You'll see that collapse when Google faces a few more privacy lawsuits and schools realize forcing their students into Google's system likely isn't legal. There are already a few cases in process about it.

[koprulusector]

I’ve been using Linux for work and personal for 4 years. Almost everything used in the enterprise today has a web app/electron version or runs natively. Including MS products themselves. I laugh maniacally every time I’m working in Word online... muahahaha

[Shared404]

When Microsoft starts writing apps for Linux...

[EvanAnderson]

There's Teams... >snicker<

[hpcjoe]

Teams ... is terrible. Doesn't matter the platform.

[Lucasoato]

I've been using Teams for a couple of months in Linux Mint, works fine kinda. It froze only once and it was ok after a restart.

[kaliszad]

@Shared404 has written applications not garbage. /s

[Shared404]

Lol. TBF, Linus never specified that they had to be good applications :P .

They (did? / are doing?) Edge for Linux though, for some reason.

[eterm]

How many employees do you have?

[PascLeRasc]

The macOS hardware is a little more expensive but over the long run it's significantly cheaper: https://www.vox.com/2016/10/20/13337652/mac-ibm-business-che...

[kiwijamo]

Apple hardware have some downsides though. One big advantage of HP, Dell, etc is their support. Apple repairs takes weeks (especially here in New Zealand) as they expect devices to be sent long distances to wherever they repair them. HP, Dell, etc can do on-site repairs in <24 hours in many cases. If it's just your personal device then a few weeks may be an inconvenience. But for businesses it can cost them enough that getting a support contract from HP, Dell, et al can be worth it.

[lysium]

I’m sorry, what are you talking about? You boot your new Mac laptop from your time machine backup and are back working within hours, not weeks.

[mschuster91]

That's bollocks. Time Machine performance over network is atrocious.

With a HP/Dell Enterprise line model all you need is a decent set of screwdrivers (and if you're touching anything that requires taking off heat pipes, skme thermal paste) and you can literally replace any part in a hour or two from a spare laptop - or you just swap the disk in a spare.

With Apple's newest shit you can't even do that since everything is soldered.

I'm a die-hard Apple fan, but for large shops professional machines are lower in maintenance cost.

[matwood]

It's been awhile since I was in a big org, but when I was, no one was replacing laptop parts. The deals we had with Dell/HP were basically overnight replacements (this was different from servers where we had 4 hour on-site support). Then we would send them broken machines that would eventually come back fixed.

So do big orgs actually have people internally swapping random parts in a laptop to see if they can fix it?

Doesn't change the point that Apple was more expensive, but mainly because Dell/HP prices go way down at volume.

[sofixa]

That really pisses me off.

Go look at the source, IBM. They started a pilot program, with power users, and converted them to Macs, and then a year in said that Macs need less support and cost less over their 3 year lifecycle.

See the problems? They couldn't know a year in about 3 costs over 3 years, and taking power users that demand Macs and saying they don't need support is obvious. That's a bullshit and obviously wrong "statistic" and source to use.

[Angostura]

Typing this on a late 2012 iMac which remains my main workhorse. I'm considering a new M1 iMac when they come out, but really no need at the moment, now I've fitted a a 2TB SSD

[foolmeonce]

Hm.. I find it funny that organizations use MS products and stay in business. The amount of downtime and ridiculous failures I saw regularly as a consultant were astounding.

My coworkers used Macs which really don't cost anything given hardware lasts 8+ years now. Most companies using Windows have a large budget for laptop IT that costs more than replacing expensive machines often if that were necessary.

[kiwijamo]

I've found Macs don't really last that much longer. The previous Mac I had, I actually begged for it to be replaced as it had a spinny HDD and recent versions of macOS run very poorly on these. Luckily it turned out it was close to being sent back to the leasing company. $EMPLOYER policy (as often is the case in larger employers) don't allow me to replace the HDD with the SSD. The newer one I now have which has a SSD is now performing poorly so I am already looking forward to a replacement already and it's still under the 3 years window. My colleagues with PCs (as we are issued PC or Macs depending on the location we work at at the time) seem to be happy with even the older PCs. I had a oldish temp PC for a while when my Mac needed repairs and it ran Windows fairly well. I used to be a big advocate for Macs but not any more.

[foolmeonce]

The HDD macs work very well with an SSD swap (hard in a corporate setting,) or just an external SSD (easy in a corporate setting.) But should have maximum RAM (hard to change in a corporate setting.)

I'm not at all fond of the newer more disposable Macs. Still, they should perform pretty well. One of my coworkers installed browser themes that seemed to be crypto mining or something equally ridiculous once. You may want to create a fresh user without any personalization and see if problems go away. I find Mac users and PC users tend never to do a wipe/install and almost everyone tends to port their problems with them by bringing their home directory even to new machines of the same OS.

[zamadatix]

If a place's main problem with their laptops is what type of hardware they selected they are doing extraordinarily well in my book. It's usually the 10,000 lbs of bullshit apps in the standard image and grossly inefficient means of dealing with users issues that create the performance issues or drive up department costs in the long run. Few workers really have much of a local performance need that they wouldn't notice if a raspberry pi came in as long as it was well maintained and behaved the same functionality wise.

At my previous employer they started to allow Macs and people were clamoring for them because they ran GREAT but after the first few thousand went out they started building up the amount of BS loaded approached being equal to the Windows ones and suddenly the satisfaction levels started to even out with the standard build. Chromebooks actually became very popular because they were even harder to be loaded with crap than Macs.

[adjkant]

> Office software

GSuite seems like the answer here. Mail, Docs, Sheets, Slides will work for a vast majority of businesses.

[ThinkBeat]

If you wish to compare MS offerings to GSuite then you should not compare it to on prem but to Office365.

I do not believe without data that switch from one closed source proprietary software provider to another one will guarantee you from hacks.

Switch to open source most certainly does not. Nor is switching from one proprietary provider for your software from Microsoft -> google

[adjkant]

It's not a guarantee but I'll trust Google for application security over Microsoft every time.

That said, it's not the question. The question is if a company wanted to switch away from Microsoft here, what is their option? It's not an inherent statement that one is actually better, but that there is an option if one feels burned by Microsoft here.

[arcturus17]

I’d trust them marginally better, but certainly not orders of magnitude more. We don’t know if Google would do significantly better if they operated at the same scale as MS in Enterprise. Google operates some consumer properties at an even larger scale, but I get the feeling that Enterprise is particularly attractive to hackers for the potential rewards.

Last week Firebase sent me a notification that several of my properties (some of them enterprise apps) had lost domain name verification. The panel in the console was clearly glitched when I inspected it. Two days later they sent a correction saying that this had been a mistake. No big deal, but it goes on to show that Google is not perfect.

[adjkant]

I'm not sure what scale would affect this that Google hasn't already hit? I've already had GSuite for my high school, my college, and my work. What additional scale would open up massive security holes? This seems like it's very much just horizontally scaling the same product.

Not to mention that GSuite already has 6M different customers/tenants. They're already at a comparable scale, and that doesn't mention that the free versions have the same application security model, with zero incidents (knock on wood). "but scale" feels like it's ignoring the already existing track record and scale and just making excuses for Microsoft.

[swebs]

At this point, I'd trust a guy selling software out of a van over Microsoft.

[kaliszad]

There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for. If your corporate application doesn't run with a useful web interface, you probably have other issues too.

Word is an application that puts looks, thousands of mostly useless features and pixel-pushing up front. Excel at least really enables normal people to do some advanced calculations on data but the former still applies. Both are very complex tools mostly hindering any kind of value-added thinking and creativity but give you enough foot-guns and are really "fun" to support if you count Outlook in as well. I mean, how do you program an application that regularly crashes and corrupts the email database? LibreOffice is the same kind of thinking, because it mostly is a copy of the ideas in Word, Excel etc. Actually, when we are at it, Google Docs is more or less as problematic as the other tools.

Actually, just opening any of these applications seems a bit overwhelming. Why should you care that the readable font is 11 or 12 px big (it actually isn't that comfortable to read, but ok)? Why should you care that the default font is called Calibri or whatever? This is information and complexity that is shown by default that usually adds exactly nothing to your business. The same is with colours. Why should you want to have the option to select custom colours with two clicks or so when most people choose colours badly? The default colours offered are really not that great either.

[macintux]

You’re arguing against decades of experience to the contrary.

I certainly would prefer plain text for most content a business generates, but the market has overwhelmingly voted in the other direction.

I believe for some interactions with the U.S. government Word is even mandatory. And it’s effectively mandatory for collaboration with everyone else.

[futuretaint]

many industries are dependant on Excel also. entire industries. Accounting, finance etc...

[kaliszad]

You mean the industries, that are liable for most of the initial suffering during the 1930s, 2000s and so on? A case could be made that some of it lead more or less directly to wars.

Accounting and finance should know much, much better to use something actually auditable. Pretty much all software in any way associated with those industries that I have seen is at best average by enterprise software quality standards but most is barely useable. In that sense, Excel is probably the better choice. :-)

[arcturus17]

Spreadsheets are insanely versatile and useful. I think if you were to redesign a lot of the things they do as custom apps, you’d end up with poorer version of a spreadsheet, like you’re saying.

I’ve experienced this first-hand when building custom business apps. You’re building your UI in React or whatever only to conclude: “Fuck, this is a spreadsheet.”

[kaliszad]

That people use something and maybe even extract some business value from doing so doesn't necessarily mean the product or the ideas around it are great and cannot be improved upon in various substantial ways. People used to ride horses and cows, people used slaves for manual work instead of inventing and using the steam engine at scale much earlier e.g. in ancient Greece or Rome.

I don't mind rich text and I know a bit of typography to avoid some common mistakes but I don't think most users really appreciate a full scale of sizes in pixels for a font or other information not relevant to the content they are producing. Most would be much better of using normal, small, large, very large for presentation or posters or something like that. The absolute values could be set in settings or overwritten somewhere maybe but Word isn't actually meant for designing websites or posters. It does all of those things to some degree but it very much isn't the right tool for the job in those areas and shouldn't be treated like one.

Btw. nobody can tell, if the businesses wouldn't be better of using something more robust than Excel even when that would mean actually training people to use a different tool. Most companies probably never train Excel, so even using that is very certainly inefficient. You know, there isn't much business value in Excel macros with viruses in them or macros nobody understands - so maybe what they calculate isn't even correct in some or all cases.

Excel is great for some things, but for many things it is used in practise it is actually quite bad. E.g. some people write working hours in Excel. There are much better apps just for that. You could have Google or Microsoft Forms, that are much easier and more robust. The data can then be used as well in a spreadsheet or imported into a DB. Unfortunately, Word and Excel (and Outlook) have developed their own gravity field in many industries and so the (very low) local maxima cannot be escaped (somewhat easily).

Having a government use anything as a stamp of approval does it a bit of disservice. If we would rely on current governments for innovation, we could just as well return to the caves directly. More seriously, if by collaboration you mean sending people word documents by email named final-assessment-v2-final.doc (because docx hasn't really arrived in many places and people suck at useable version control) then I am with you. Everyone else (including you probably) just writes the text into the email directly or uses something actually collaborative (for example Google Docs). The real final version is produced, after a consensus has been reached using more efficient communication channels.

The state of affairs is the market for pretty much everything currently is in a bubble. The US governments debt is more than twice the total amount of gold mined during the whole of human history (https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...) if a tonne of gold is roughly worth 60 Mio. USD. We haven't improved the working efficiency since the end of 90s much if you are frank. I wouldn't be so sure the market is a good measure of a products absolute quality actually.

[mlac]

This is similar to the plain text argument, but the main thing about standard ms office apps is that they are accessible and easy to use. I can use excel to open a spreadsheet made in the last 20 years.

I know everyone who has worked in an office setting can at least open and read a spreadsheet. I don’t know about an ms form or an access DB. The default (and sometimes only) ways most people can process text files on their machine is notepad or word. Word is way better than notepad for text processing.

If I send out a docx file, I know the formatting will be consistent when they open it. We can track changes easily without having non-technical people figuring out git or some other repo, and it will be compatible and easily viewable if we acquire any companies or are acquired.

The MS apps have basically become the standard applications to process plain text.

Lastly, I understand the value of some applications for data processing over excel. But when you’ve got to train up a new marketing or sales person every 6 months in R, that will get old very quickly. You can at least expect they know Excel and should be able to understand a spreadsheet.

[kaliszad]

Actually, Microsoft Office apps (others are not much better if at all) are not objectively easy to use for everyone. Just sit down a kid in the 2. or 3. grade and let them write about what they like with some structure, include pictures, print it out. You can go further: can they share a Word or Excel document on social media and will it generate a preview or do people have to download the whole document first and have some app that understands office documents installed? Ok, now sit them down in front of a brand new computer with Windows. How long will it take until they can edit a document in Microsoft Word, when they have to buy and install Office first?

Not very hard tasks to me - because I have done all of them hundreds of times. Other, even more advanced tools by Microsoft of course would fare much worse even with people like you and me, otherwise quite proficient with digital tools, if we haven't learned to use the one tool beforehand.

Yeah, Word is better than Notepad if what you want is to write rich text, but is it actually much better than WordPad from the usability perspective?

You have other problems, when your environment is so unstable that you have to hire new people every 6 months. Nowadays, you cannot expect any knowledge really unless the people can show a certification. Even a diploma in CS from a university doesn't mean the people know how to program useful stuff.

[ericd]

As far as I can tell, the legal world still runs completely on Word redlining/track changes. Also, Excel almost literally runs many businesses.

As long as those are true, I'm not sure you can say "there just isn't much you really need eg. Word for", unless you're never on the business side. If you deal with the people who use them, you probably also want to use them to avoid headaches. Network effects are a bitch.

If you're only ever slinging code, sure, congrats, you may never need to use either.

Note, I'm not arguing that either is good.

[breakfastduck]

> There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for.

You can't be serious. There's not much businesses need excel for?

[kaliszad]

Do they need table calculation or do they need Excel specifically?

I am not saying, Excel isn't useful in any case. I am saying, it is very far from a good solution in many, many cases and state concrete examples.

[matwood]

Everyone only uses 10 features from Excel, the problem is that those 10 features are different for every user. Anytime someone says users don't need Excel or it can be easily replicated by some other tool, they likely haven't spent much time with Excel or users.

[kaliszad]

Well, I have used Excel extensively so I know its warts very well. You can use Excel right but in my experience anytime I have seen even quite capable people working with Excel, nobody in that work setting would exactly describe it as fun. I know at least one person, who really uses Excel very proficiently and maybe even have something approaching fun while doing it. But he is literally teaching Excel to other people. I have done 30 hours in his course and learned quite a bit.

[ocdtrekkie]

You'd be shocked how dependent office staff can be on obscure MS Office features that I, a systems engineer, has literally never heard of and couldn't imagine someone needed.

Heck, this year I watched someone struggle to find and license a third party add-on just to do a mail merge on Google Workspace.

[kaliszad]

I know, I have seen it first hand. It was lots of wasted time for very little value pretty much every time I have seen it. I hope you have a better experience.

Most of the time, actually stepping back a bit and thinking about the problem at hand for a minute can save many hours of tedious work. E.g. keeping track of hours worked - probably just use Toggl and export a CSV at the end of a month or something - much better UX overall than a form in Excel that you have to print out. Doing project planing in anything from Excel, over SharePoint, OneNote, Outlook Calendar etc. was always extra hassle in my experience. Everything kind of works but not really, you avoid doing changes, because it is very tedious.

I have seen all the enterprise "Export to Excel" web interfaces that are usually so bad, you cannot get anything done without the Export/ Import feature. I mean, Export/ Import is great but maybe you should just have na API and/or a useable web interface. There of course, Excel/ Spreadsheet is a temporary saviour but you should think about why do you have to use such a bad software system at all!