Microsoft to buy 4% of London Stock Exchange in 10-year platform deal Microsoft said this morning it expects to pull in $5 billion in revenue from a deal with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) to haul the British exchange operator's data platform into the cloud. The agreement will see the American software behemoth buy 4 percent equity of LSEG itself from the Blackstone/Thomson Reuters …
... Microsoft? Really, Microsoft??
Well, it seems so.
The number of companies I've seen using Office 365 / Dyanmics / Teams since the (first) lockdown is insane. I even had a call with a hosting vendor we use which largely offers Linux based servers only to find the call was on Teams and pretty much the entire company - aside from the infrastructure they sold - was running on MS tech! Bonkers.
Personally the last time I used any MS tech in my day-to-day work was around 8 years ago. I haven't kept up but it seems to me like they're eating up a big chunk of the market. Market for what though? We know the world runs on Excel, has done for the last 20+ years, and I can't see that going away any time soon. Maybe that's the reason: because they are The Excel People (TM) as far as those who make decisions on what tech to use goes.
After that conversation with my hosting provider the one thing that stuck out was... it doesn't really matter what the use-case or business need is... somebody can fill it with a Microsoft "solution" even if it involves a clusterfuck of import/export Excel file routines to make things "work". Throw in a few Power BI charts and the board-level folks will be kept happy.
It blows my mind that even though it's nearly 2023 everything still lives in Excel and so much other software is just a means to import from, or export to it. Creating multiple sources of truth and a shit ton of problems.
I'm only tangentially an MS user bit this is just silly. Teams used to be dogshit but honestly these days it's genuinely pretty good. It does a bunch of the ancillary enterprise-y bits in a much nicer way for security-conscious customers than Zoom or Google Meet does. The big example being that it's possible to enforce your org's policies on your staff joining a call hosted by someone else. This means it's possible for me to host calls with my public sector customers with either one of us hosting and the same rules applied either way - no chat, no files, no remote control and so on - without me having to put in place some special snowflake customer-specific policy, and without one of us faffing about making sure it's always hosted from the "right end". It also does some other bits right like modeling file transfer as an upload to OneDrive and archiving meeting chats persistently alongside emails for super easy compliance/retention.
Sure, it's not as slick or high-quality as zoom, but the idea that all MS tech is evil and anyone using it is stupid is these days just plain dumb. If you've not used any of it in nearly a decade you shouldn't be surprised to find out your recollection of the products isn't the same as reality. Office even has collaboration and versioning now!
The main thing to be worried about as an MS user these days isn't quality or capability, it's just pure reliability. Azure's reliability record this year is miles and miles behind AWS's and Google's. Multiple major outages. That's going to be a very big deal for LSEG.
It will be exactly like this.
Microsoft just did this to NBA streaming. Since it became "powered by Microsoft" in September, it is not possible to view any video streams on a Linux box, no matter what browser is used. The same browser will stream happily from a Windows PC, even if Windows is a VM running inside the very same Linux box where the streaming is refused. Documented on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/xsk2hj/nbacom_no_longer_shows_videos_on_linux/
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