Money grubbing ass-hats, that is:
Microsoft has always been a money grubbing bunch of @#$$)!! – OldNFO
Found this originally on Old NFO’s Substack.
This isn’t a big surprise. Tech companies love them some subscriptions, cloud ones especially. This way they control the whole magilla and simply collect money. Prior to that, and even still now, they have software assurance, or maintenance plans. My big rainbowcorp employer gets over 80% of it’s revenue from captive customers and maintenance contracts.
What does this mean? It means that they covet that sweet, sweet recurring revenue so they don’t need to innovate to keep on top of the heap.
Microsoft no longer ‘sells’ software of any type, they ‘lease’ it on subscription. Dell computers cut a ‘deal’ with Microsoft years ago, just paying them for the licenses for Windows for their computers, even if the customers didn’t want it…
Now, they want you to lease EVERYTHING and put it in the cloud. – OldNfo
That’s the plan. Dumb terminals to the mothership. Fine for the home user, as we’ve had things such as tablets and chromebooks for sometime. But business?
Last month, I met with a mid-sized law firm facing a common dilemma. Their Windows 10 laptops were nearing the end of support and needed to be replaced. Typically, this meant buying new hardware and software—predictable and straightforward. But this time, Microsoft suggested a different approach: move to Windows 365 Cloud PCs, a PC that operates with a monthly subscription and is accessible from any device, scalable, secure, and AI-enhanced. The catch? The shift from ownership to a subscription model and reduced local control led their IT team to question how “personal” these computers truly were. – David Linthicum
Ok. This is a problem and always has been. I remember having a conversation with the soon-to-be ex-wife about this with her accounting firm. The two big tax packages were pushing for users to transition to the cloud edition. Right off the bat, you have problemo numbero uno – what happens when the interwebs go down? How do you work?
I have a car dealer buddy that uses a web based inventory and sales management tool. What he does is have two internet providers – FIOS (from Frontier here) and T-Mobile wireless. He has no access, he can’t sell cars. I had a doctor that had the same problem. I had an appointment, he couldn’t access their app, the cloud app itself was down. No charts, no notes, no anything. Luckily, he knew me so we could do the appointment. What it meant for him was more work when it came back online.
But here’s the deal with medical, accounting, and law – Infosecurity. You, as the owner of proprietary client data, are number one on the hitlist should their private data be exposed. It’s the client’s data, you are it’s custodian. You have little to no control what a cloud provider can do with the data. We already know they’ve been using it to train their AI. Read the fine print on those cloud contracts and subscriptions. And all it takes is some blue haired freak with a nose-ring and a grudge to let loose your data if they decide you are the enemy, and then it’s game on. They won’t be taking the L when that happens. You will. They’ll collect the money but none of the risk.
I’ve been in this business over 30 years. I’ve seen the underbelly of this industry. Let me tell you, Your data isn’t as secure as you’d think with these big corporations. I was rebuilding a network for a large bank, went into an abandoned floor, and there were gondola dumpster carts full of data just sitting there. Go out to the courtyard, and you could attach to any number of wifi network APs that the end users plugged into a network jack. I walked around there for a month without a badge. Everyone let me in whatever door I needed without question. I could’ve plugged in my own AP, or a keyboard reader to any machine – most of which weren’t locked.
I moved my money out of that bank not a month after darkening the doors there.
We need some hard laws for data protection and AI in this country. Your data should be treated like any other personal property, and should someone take possession illegally, they should be punished as hard as if they stole your car. And if you are a business – especially accounting, law, or medical, you need 100% control of your data.
What to do?
There are options, Linux being the best, if you are somewhat computer literate. That is a good open OS and it is supported world wide by volunteers. If you don’t want to run MS Office ver whatever, the options are include LibreOffice Writer (which I run), OnlyOffice, or a lightweight version called AbiWord.
As for me, I went to Macs when MS Windoze ver 7 died. I have not regretted it, and I started running what was then OpenOffice and was happy with it. – OldNfo
I cannot abide by being an annuity for a company – any of them. Even the $100 or so a year MS wanted for an O365 subscription is too much. I cut out CoPilot and renewed because I thought I’d need it for another year. I really don’t, and I aim to cancel it.
I use Windowz 11 for work and have cultivated a pathological hate of it. Same with O365. I spent ten minutes of a global team call fucking with sound controls, wondering why none of the sound controls worked, not even the hardware buttons on the function keys. And why was it playing on the internal speakers and not on my sound bar? All I wanted to do was mute the sales nob so I could concentrate on other things. Where was it? In gottdam MS Teams. Why is Teams assuming control of my hardware settings? Every device said “don’t allow apps to control”. Yet, here was an app poaching control. Such is Microsoft. We’ll do what we want whether you like it or not, so fuck you. It’s why I shunned it for personal use.
What I did is go Mac. You can quibble all you want about light-side, dark-side but they generally are better with security on their gear than Microsquish. And all my devices work together. My Mac, unlike with Windows, has a documents folder that exists only on it’s HD, with iCloud being a separate folder. You have total control over your environment. At least, I haven’t found anywhere where I haven’t had this so far.
I also use Mint Linux, although I’ve used Ubuntu in the past. It’s very easy to install, has most of what you need – all of it for a business user – and has a decent, intuitive interface. The Girl needed a machine for her job hunt (she was laid off). The old laptop I gave her running Win10 before shit the bed. I happened to have another, newer machine that I wasn’t using that I loaded Ubuntu on for her. She loves it. She’s no computer person, but has had zero problems with it. She’s easily learned how to do what she needs to do with it.
BTW – If you are going with a cloud based app, you don’t need windows whatsoever. If I were a CTO, I’d ditch every last Windows machine.
If you want to read a better analysis of the dumpster fire that is Windows 11, Read Didact here, the whole thing. He also has some great info in his sidebars about securing your data world.
As a funny aside, I have a number of friends I’ve worked with in the IT world over the years. I’ve lost track of a few of them. One that I worked with in two companies was a guru on everything he touched – Novell, Windows, whatever. Super sharp. Last I saw he was working for Amazon AWS. I saw a post by him on LinkedIn last week. He gave up the IT world and is now a fireman in a small town. Probably had a gut-full of the silliness and went to do something more meaningful in the meat space, like help people with a gig that has a pension he’s still young enough to put in 20 years then enjoy. Good for him.
Inspected By Pat 