[Stranger43]

If crowdsource QA department is all that stands between you and days of no operations then you chose to live with the near certainty that you will have days rather then hours of unplanned company wide downtime.

And if you cannot actually abandon someone like microsoft that consistantly screws up their QA then it's basically dishonest for you to claim that reliability is even a concern for your desktop platform.

And that's essentially what i say when i accuse the modern enterprise it's client device teams of being stuck in the 90ies as those risk were totally acceptable back when the stakes were low and outages only impacted non time critical back office clerical work. but what we saw today was that those high risk cost optimized systems got deployed into roles where the risk/consequence profile is entirely different.

So what you do is that you keep the low impact data entry clerks and spreadsheet wranglers on the windows platform but threat the customer facing workers dealing with time sensitive task something a bit less risky.

It's might not be as easy as just deploying the same old platform designed back in the 90ies to everyone but once you leave the Microsoft ecosystem dual sourcing based on open standards become totally feasible, at costs that might not be prohibitive as everything in the unix like ecosystem including web browsers have multiple independent implementations so you basically just have to standardize of 2-4 rather then one platform which again isnt unfeasible.

It's telling that an Azure region failed this news cycle without anyone noticing because companies just don't tolerate the kind of risk people takes with their wintel desktop for their backends so most critical services hosted in microsofts Iowa datacenter had and second site on standby.

[jimnotgym]

>And if you cannot actually abandon someone like microsoft that consistantly screws up their QA

The last outage I can remember due to an ms update was 7 or 8 years ago. Desktops got stuck on 'update 100% complete'. After a couple of minutes I pressed ctrl+alt+del and it cleared. Before that...I don't remember. Btw MS provides excellent tools to manage updates, and you can apply them on a rolling basis.

[EvanAnderson]

> If crowdsource QA department is all that stands between you and days of no operations ...

For companies of a certain large size, I guess. For all but the largest companies, though, there's no choice but to outsource software risks to software manufacturers. The idea that every company is going to shoulder the burden of maintaining their own software is ridiculous. Companies use off-the-shelf software because it makes good financial sense.

> And if you cannot actually abandon someone like microsoft that consistantly screws up their QA then it's basically dishonest for you to claim that reliability is even a concern for your desktop platform.

When a company has significant software assets tied to a Microsoft platform there's no alternative. A company is going to use the software that best-suits their needs. Platform is a consideration, however I've never seen it be the dominant consideration.

Today's issue isn't a Microsoft problem. The blame rests squarely on Crowdstrike and their inability to do QA. The culture of allowing "security software" to automatically update is bad, but Crowdstrike threw the lit match into that tinderbox by pushing out this update globally.

As another comment points out, Microsoft has good tools for rolling update releases for corporate environments. They're not perfect but they're not terrible either.

> It's might not be as easy as just deploying the same old platform ...

When a company doesn't control their software platform they don't have this choice. Off-the-shelf software is going to dictate this.

In some fantasy world where every application is web-based and legacy code is all gone maybe that's a possibility. I have yet to work in that environment. Companies aren't maintaining the "wintel desktop" because they want to.

[Stranger43]

Blaming crowdstikes QA might feel good but the problem is that no company in the history of the world have been good enough at QA for it not to be reckless to allow day one patching of critical systems, or for that matter to allow single vendor, single design, critical systems in the first place. and yet the cyber security guidelines required to allow the pretense that windows can be used securely all but demand that companies take that risk.

It's also fundamentally a problem of Danial, everyone knows there will not be an good solution to any issue around security and stability that does not require that the assets tied up inside fragile monopoly operated ecosystems to be eventually either extracted or written off but nobody want to blaze new trails.

Claiming powerlessness is just lazy yes it might take an decade to get out from under the yokel of an abusive vendor, we saw this with IBM, but as IBM is now an footnote in the history of computing it's pretty clear that it can be done once people start realizing there is an systematic problem and not just a serious of one-off mistakes.

And we know how to design reliable systems, it's just that doing so is completely incompatible with allowing any of America's Big IT Vendors to remain big and profitable, and thats scary to every institution involved in the current market.