His job is to ensure the federal government, provinces and cities don't switch to Linux and LibreOffice. He wants them to keep buying expensive Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows licenses.

While Trump spits on Canada, taxpayer money is being systematically vacuumed out of the country by these pigs. We are paying them to conquer us. We are funding our own economic colonization. Every dollar sent south is a piece of Canada’s financial future slipping away.

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 25 points 3 days ago

The Canadian people should rally against politicians and business people who systematically want to transfer Canadian money to the US.

[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

This guy sounds like a total fuck head, but does he have anything to do with today's Trump tantrum?

[–] Reannlegge@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 days ago

Microslop released EU leaders information because they were talking about leaving MS paint, windows, or 365. He is going to be going around saying remember we have your nudes, taxes, and all your other information.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 4 points 3 days ago

[+] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca -17 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Windows costs next to nothing these days in the scheme of overall software costs. Office is only a tiny portion of what comes with a M365 subscription, most of which is valuable. Libre office can replace desktop office, but doesn't replace the rest of the integrated stack that Microsoft has.

Until there's competition that goes well beyond just the desktop software Microsoft will continue to win contracts. Having one system, with one login, where everything just works together for everyone is just too valuable.

I use both open source and Microsoft software. If you try to tell me open source is cheaper I'm going to laugh at you. Open source has a cheaper initial price tag, but far more expenses related to configuration, training, and maintenance.

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I think that used to be the case, but Linux has improved and Microsoft has really really declined.

I used to call MS the "backwards compatibility company" because they put a lot of effort into keeping their software with all kinds of old stuff. This made it difficult to argue against using Microsoft because as you alluded to, sticking with MS meant paying a licensing fee, but that's small potatoes compared to migrating to new software and integrating all of the business applications with that new software.

Now Microsoft doesn't support things very long. The Cloud makes them money, so they're forcing everyone to completely move everything to the cloud. They're ending a lot of old software "on-prem" software. Dynamics GP is complete dogshit but a lot of businesses are heavily integrated with it. They're going to end that, but don't worry you can pay some expensive consultants to help you move things to the cloud.

For .Net their concept of "LTS" is effectively 2 years. That means making changes to software every two years. Since it's becoming required to run everything on their cloud services they could just shut down your applications even if you wanted to put off an upgrade... which would probably not be a good idea because you'd be running a webservice on an out of date and unsupported stack. Some application running on-prem behind a firewall you could get away with that. Now you have to do a bunch of work to keep thing updated based on Microsoft's schedule.

The end result is sticking with MS means significantly more IT work than in the past. LTS on a MS .Net based stack is 2 years. In Linux land, LTS is typically 5 years. Microsoft doesn't back-port things to their older servers to force you to buy new licenses or move to Azure.

If you move to Azure, you're actually running your programs on Linux anyway (Note even MS wants to try maintaining Windows Servers LOL), you're just restricted on how much control you have over it. So you're spending a lot of time fucking around with some shitty web interface to do things on a Linux system that you could accomplish in minutes with bash on the same OS.

Company I work for is still in the "nobody ever got fire for buying Microsoft" mentality. Past six months I've made little forward progress, because I'm mostly figuring out how to make things work on Azure, updating to .Net 10 because support for .Net 8 ends in November. I'm forced to used VS 2026 (which still has bugs, VS usually take about a year before they work out all the kinks) because they don't support .Net 10 in VS 2022. .Net 10 EOLs in 2028, so that means someone has to spend a lot of time every two years updating a lot of software. I've spent a lot of time migrating things to different servers because they didn't backport TLS 1.3 to their older server OSes (even though they say they're "supported").

You may be thinking of how MS used to be, but they're moving to be a cloud services company now. They're not the "backwards compatibility company" anymore. There are massive costs with sticking with MS now. As the guy who's job it is to keep things working, I'd rather do the work to migrate to a Linux system with a five year LTS cycle than migrating to Azure with a two year LTS cycle. I'm migrating shit either way, but with MS my job is becoming just constantly updating a lot of shit on the whims of Microsoft.

Contacting Microsoft about issues is a waste of time now. You may as well cut out the middle-man and ask copilot for help because it feels like there isn't anyone actually working at MS if you ask them about anything technical. Asking copilot is useless, but at least you get a useless answer faster than asking anyone at MS.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Linux isn't the problem. You're right that linux has improved significantly, but pretending that windows is what Microsoft sells these days is a hilariously bad take. Windows makes up maybe 5% of the total revenue at Microsoft.

Governments and companies aren't buying Windows, they're buying the entire Microsoft ecosystem. This includes an operating system (windows) and desktop office software (office) but also everything from identity management (Entra), e-mail servers (Exchange), Cloud Storage (SharePoint/OneDrive), Task Management(Outlook/Planner), Communications (Teams), Automation (Power Platform), Data Analysis (PowerBI/Fabric), etc.

You could drop windows and office, use Linux and Libre office instead and it would still be a good idea to pay for M365 subscriptions for the rest of what's happening there.

They're forcing people to the cloud, you're right, but if they didn't you would still want to force yourself into the cloud by running critical services in a datacenter for your organization. Doing things in the cloud makes a lot of sense.

Individually specific open source alternatives can be better than their Microsoft equivalent, but taken as a whole bundle that needs to work for your organization, it simply doesn't make sense.

Fuck developers, I'm talking about USERS. A 10,000 person company isn't 90% developers, it's 10% developers and 90% people who just want their shit to work every day.

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Fuck developers, I’m talking about USERS.

Remember the Ballmer "developers developers developers" meme? Cringey as fuck, but MS did actually try to make things good for developers. Do you think they did that out of altruism?

Nope, it was a strategy. Obviously you don't appreciate the people whose job was to make systems actually work, but Microsoft used to because they knew there's a million different details involved with integration of a businesses software with their software. Make it easy for developers to make things work, then from the USERS perspective the software does what they need it to do.

They’re forcing people to the cloud, you’re right, but if they didn’t you would still want to force yourself into the cloud by running critical services in a datacenter for your organization.

Is it though? The Australian government lost a huge amount of data when they moved to the cloud. Someone at Google fucked up and databases were deleted and the backups weren't all that good and so data loss. I'm sure mistakes like that won't happen when they have AI making decisions about maintaining data, right? LOL

Also there's privacy considerations. Maybe you work at a startup that sells customer data to whoever will buy it so that's not a concern. But some places actually do have confidential data. Places like the government. These places forbid sharing data with third parties. Microsoft is a third party. So cloud isn't going to work for those situations.

It's part of the overall issue in IT security now. Just make security someone else's responsibility so we won't get blames if something goes wrong. People choose cloud not because it's better security (it's worse), but because it allows shifting blame.

Sorry buddy, but if you're a user just that wants your shit to work every day, then you probably should listen to the developers who actually know how the shit works. Microsoft isn't the same company it used to be. It was never all that great, but at least their strategy is all about making things work for businesses. Now they've shifted to making businesses work for them. Get everyone to do LinkedIn classes to train into you that Microsoft is the only way to do things.

Things will break and you'll probably blame the developers for it, seems to be your attitude. Then the developers at your company leave because they're tired of your shit. Then your job is manually entering data into excel because you refuse to question the direction Microsoft is going.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't even know what you're complaining about at this point, this whole comment chain is talking about organizations switching between Windows/MS Office and Linux/LibreOffice. That's a user specific situation. Developers can already build their applications on whatever platform they want. There's almost zero windows desktop required development for business purposes these days unless you're producing a video game, and even then 95% of the developers have nothing to do with OS specific code. Everything else is a web app. If you're still trying to maintain legacy code in a desktop application, that's a you problem, not a Microsoft problem.

It's also funny that you think rolling your own servers is going to be more secure than using Microsoft's (or another cloud provider) at this point. Security through obscurity has never been a good idea, and AI has made that strategy 1000x worse.

I think you're too far removed from the jobs regular people, if they sit in front of a computer all day. They are spending their time in Outlook, Excel, Word, PPT, and they may have one dedicated line of business application for finance, HR, or similar. Especially in governments (as per what this comment chain is about)

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 hours ago

I don’t even know what you’re complaining about at this point, this whole comment chain is talking about organizations switching between Windows/MS Office and Linux/LibreOffice.

Because you're saying that it's wrong to do that, and giving wrongheaded rationalizations in favour of Microsoft.

It’s also funny that you think rolling your own servers is going to be more secure than using Microsoft’s (or another cloud provider) at this point. Security through obscurity has never been a good idea, and AI has made that strategy 1000x worse.

It's funny that you think putting everything on a MS cloud server isn't security through obscurity. It's just CYA security. Put it on a MS server, if it's compromised blame MS. Enroll the employees in some anti-phishing training, if they get scammed, then it's their fault. But at the end of the day, you're the one that put all of the data on a server that's accessible to everyone on the internet.

Do you even know of the boneheaded things MS has done like leaving backdoors in sharepoint that have been compromised?

And someone can just as easily misconfigure Azure to be insecure as with anything else. Putting stuff on the Cloud does not make it more secure. Where did you ever get that idea? From a Linked In course?

With the cloud, you still have to worry about both the boneheaded things someone at your company might, but add onto that the boneheaded things Microsoft ~~employees~~ AI might do. Pretending like a computer becomes magically secure simply because it's been blessed by Microsoft isn't just security through obscurity, it's security through ignorance. A big problem with security through obscurity is falsely believing something is secure when it isn't. Thinking "that's good enough" and not putting the work in to make it actually secure. That's what Microsoft is promoting. I guess you bought into it.

At the end of the day, someone needs to make decisions about who should have access to what, how to ensure everything works for the people it's supposed to and anyone who's not supposed to have access is forbidden. Sticking something onto the cloud doesn't change that, it just means there's a lot more potential points of attack and more things you have to verify is secure.

I think you’re too far removed from the jobs regular people, if they sit in front of a computer all day.

No, I work at a company that's very dependent on MS. And I build software that the people that sit on a computer all day use. They use the software I've built every day in addition to various Microsoft software that are integrated. I have to sit on a computer all day at work using Microsoft products too. Microsoft is on a steady downward trend. When they had to entice people to pay for licenses, they had an incentive to improve their products. After they move people's data to their servers, what incentive do they have to improve their software? Improving software is just a cost, and once they're the landlord of your data, they'll just collect the rent payments and never improve anything.

It would be a lot of work to transition from Microsoft at my workplace. More work for me than anyone else at my company, I'd wager. I'm willing to do that work because I can see the direction MS is going. And there's a significant amount of work involved with continuing with Microsoft.

I've also worked with all of the big cloud services... AWS, Google, Azure. Cloud services really don't improve all that much. Because why would they? They know it's expensive to migrate to another cloud service, so you won't do that. They're better off spending money on marketing than improving the service.

They're telling you cloud services are great, MS spent billions on Linked In so people will take training courses teaching them this is the best way to do things. But it's really just what's best for them, it's not good for anyone else. You're basically putting all of your company data on a fucking webserver and hoping MS knows what they're doing.

[–] prex@aussie.zone 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

...where everything just works together for everyone...

Not me.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca -2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You may not think it works together, but go try having 14 different open source packages to replicate the same functionality and then try tell me that Microsoft's stack doesn't work together. I've tried it, it's fucking painful.

Just because it doesn't do a specific function that you want doesn't mean it doesn't work together.

Being able to do things like send a chat message(Teams) to your co-worker linking to a task(Planner), that has an attached file(SharePoint), where you can then both edit the file at the same time(Office/SharePoint) before jumping into a voice call(Teams) to discuss that same file, then being able to create a meeting(Outlook) to follow-up on the finished product while remaining in a single application(Teams) the entire time is what I mean by working together.

You simply can't do that with any other stack. You can get one or two parts of that, but never anything like the whole.

Disagree with me all you want, but Microsoft knows how to integrate. That's why companies consistently choose them. The only reason other countries are moving away from Microsoft has to do with political reasons, which to be fair is completely valid. However, the product is still better, and anyone who says differently is lying. The only thing that even comes close is Google's offerings, and that isn't any better because it's also American.

Even Nextcloud is pretty bad, every single thing is an additional paid add-on.

[–] nik282000@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

Found Matt Milton's account.