Video download link | md5sum b0d4e92fba64b35ea848618255568716 Outsourced Computing Means Trouble Ahead Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: So-called 'Cloud Computing' is a marketing ploy; it is a sick plan to scam people out of their software and out of their own computers; we need to counter this collective stupidity, which is perpetuated by corrupted (sponsored by corporations) media and groupthink that appeals to supposed "novelty" (as if outsourcing is an advancement)

THE above video was made in response to many Microsoft downtimes that even Microsoft-connected sites reported on, e.g. [1, 2].

To quote one of the articles: "Microsoft 365 is down again today. That hardly sounds new or surprising to many as it is almost a weekly occurrence."

In Australia it was down for over a day this month! Over a day!

"Sadly, many companies (including my last employer) get infiltrated by people who keep promoting this mindset of "outsource everything"..."The latter report, also from a Microsoft booster's site, says that "Microsoft is investigating an ongoing outage preventing customers from sending or receiving messages using the company's Microsoft Teams communication platform."

So in 2023 some very basic functionality of IRC (1980s technology) or Jabber is not working? Is this "modern"? Is this robust?

Sadly, many companies (including my last employer) get infiltrated by people who keep promoting this mindset of "outsource everything"; some get promoted into decision-making roles and cost the companies a lot of money (tiny Sirius 'Open Source' wasted perhaps 50,000 pounds on AWS despite already having its own physical servers and in-house staff to manage these).

The above incidents serve to remind us that "Clown Computing" is for clowns. And if your company chooses it, then expect a circus. It's only a matter of time. As one reader put it, Microsoft "Teams is a weak, windows-only imitation of other services. It's a good excuse to bring up BigBlueButton and Jitsi-Meet, especially the latter."

When those things go offline you cannot even access old communications. With some software you have not even access to your files. Is "Office/Microsoft 360" offline? Then too bad. No files for you. Even if you download LibreOffice, there's no file to feed into it.

"Calligra and LibreOffice are much better options if one can fight the marketing about outsourcing everything imaginable to the detriment of operations and finances," the reader noted. "You have a lot of experience arguing with outsourcers which can be drawn into an article."

The video above talks about my personal experience with colleagues who push to outsource everything.

"The outsourcing encourages hiring of ignorant (or unsuitably trained) staff, which will in turn fail to provide adequate services to clients."The reader bought up AFS. "There were some downsides," he recalled, "but overall it was an asset and you could set up collaboration with files with people in the same room, same campus, same region, country, or planet if their institution also used AFS. No concurrent editing though, but that would be on the client end anyway."

"It lasted from the early to mid 1990s through to the middle ofthe 00s as a well-used service. Then the institutions connived to ignore it and then later to neglect it and then yet later to defund it."

"Now there are big names pretending to still be leaders yet pushing Box or Dropbox or other games. insecure non-confidential games. Coda followed but got no traction as Microsoft started to infest the minds of University administrators. Ceph is the latest to try but without any deployments even beginning to approach the scale of AFS."

Either way, companies need to take control of their systems. Enough with the outsourcing. The outsourcing encourages hiring of ignorant (or unsuitably trained) staff, which will in turn fail to provide adequate services to clients. ⬆