Some businesses find limited freedom (or GNU/Linux) on the so-called 'cloud'

Summary: GNU/Linux-based services continue to devour Microsoft's share in the office suites space; downtimes lead to erosion of Microsoft's brand

"Office 360" is a joke we started a few months back because whether one calls it Office Live or BPOS or even Office 365, it is just about as reliable as Xbox 360. It goes MIA far too often and there is no contingency either due to the 'merits' of so-called 'clouds' (Fog Computing) that suck up users' data. As we noted before, executives associated with this initiative were leaving Microsoft while we covered many downtimes that made Microsoft a laughing stock in this area [1, 2, 3, 4]. Here is the latest:

Microsoft cloud execs are crossing their fingers that Office 365, the pending successor to the Business Productivity Online Suite, is a safer bet for customers following yet another crash in North America.

Customers across the region and in London reported problems logging into the hosted service – Exchange Online and SharePoint Online – from yesterday morning for three hours as Microsoft tried to resolve the outage, which transpired to have been caused by network hardware failure.

Microsoft insists on not using BSD as well as not using GNU/Linux (see Hotmail and FAST) and this is why Microsoft is failing to catch up in terms of uptime. As a Microsoft booster has just put it, there is a new "Microsoft Horror Story" as "Newspaper Chain Is Switching 8,500 Employees To Google Apps" (and it is not the first). They probably require decent uptime, which Microsoft cannot deliver. And in the newspaper industry every minute counts. To quote:

One isolated case doesn't make a trend, but Microsoft should be worried about cases like the McClatchy newspaper chain.

A loyal Microsoft shop today, McClatchy is shifting its 8,500 employees over to Google Apps.

Google Apps is proprietary (people should use LibreOffice or something similar instead), but it runs on top of GNU/Linux

Isn't it funny that on the Web, Microsoft Office is just a poor man's Google Apps and Hotmail is a poor woman's Gmail? ⬆