That substack series of posts should be sobering reading for anyone who thinks that relying on somebody else's computer is a good idea. That's Azure. Who knows what lies behind the rest?
Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus
In 2024, federal cybersecurity evaluators reportedly dismissed Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCC High) as garbage, although they used a more colorful term. To understand why, it helps to consider the history of the underlying Azure infrastructure. Axel Rietschin, who worked as an engineer on Azure Core Compute …
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Saturday 4th April 2026 22:10 GMT Doctor Syntax
It's not even mentioned in the articles. The problem was at a much higher level than that. As with the internet in Gates' day, came on the scene too late, chased AWS with ambitious target for functionality, released before ready, Got rid of testers, redeploying some to development. Technically ignorant manglers with no idea as to whether it was fit for purpose or not, Lost institutional knowledge & tried to develop complex stuff with inexperienced developers. Arbitrarily decided to write everything new in Rust, dragging in a lot of external stuff. Ignored warnings passed up the chain except for firing the messenger when they didn't like the message. And instead of fixing the product they had a lot of operational staff just stepping in and fixing things out of sight - or, as I suppose you might put it, below the horizon.
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Monday 6th April 2026 06:53 GMT VBF
As regards Testers.....
"Got rid of testers, redeploying some to development. "
I used to be a Contract Tester. An agent once put me forward to MS who offered me a contract.
I refused it because the rate was nearly 30% less than I could earn elsewhere!
So the Testers they got were paid peanuts......you know what you get when you pay peanuts!
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Tuesday 7th April 2026 13:18 GMT Charlie Clark
Microsoft does have a history of being a follower not a leader and it's prepared to use any means, fair or foul, to get there. Look at how long it's taken them to get a working chat and video application out of a working chat and video application. Teams is, in my experience, by far the worst out there with particularly poor resource use, but MS has used its monopoly position brilliantly to make it the "standard" program out there. Quality never mattered once they discovered they could either buy or lock-out the competition and fob users off with "the next version".
But I don't think Rust has anything to do with this. I don't use the language but I know quite a few low-level and systems programmers who are very happy with it.
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Monday 6th April 2026 15:04 GMT GhostOutsidetheShell
I won’t say you are entirely wrong but the cost of true mentors and training is pretty hard to swallow when biting the bullet and dropping thousands of dollars to maybe get hired. For me it was always the lack of a mentor. Companies don’t hire for the mentor role. Most senior developers are always too busy to mentor.
That’s is one aspect about AI I no longer need a mentor and I can learn anything I desire. Before you go all vibe code accusatory you need to understand that vibe coding is a term for someone who is not, never has been, nor even works in the IT field designing software and not able to see the faults of what was given. Yes AI gets things wrong but knowing about the faults of AI and industry standards allows a person to become a junior developer. Only through mentoring will that junior grow in the proper ways. Before you start pointing at generations make sure as an elder, wise man, a senior that you are doing your part.
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Thursday 9th April 2026 21:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
“I no longer need a mentor and I can learn anything I desire” — Exhausted sigh. You have to know about something, you have to have something on your radar, in order just to know that it’s something you don’t know about. You are essentially imagining that you can devise your own syllabus for any topic you’d like to learn about without knowing anything whatsoever about it (or that you can assess a syllabus devised by AI, to be more precise). Look up the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
“Yes AI gets things wrong but knowing about the faults of AI and industry standards allows a person to become a junior developer.” Eh, how exactly are you connecting these dots? You need the AI to not get things wrong in order for it to be reliable. Your thinking is uninformed and all over the place and AI is not going to provide you with better thinking skills. All it’s going to do is encourage what you’re already working with to atrophy.
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Sunday 5th April 2026 01:03 GMT MachDiamond
Re: I can't believe he's still alive
"I would have expected at least an immediate DMCA takedown followed by a lawsuit... or maybe a strange accident."
Short of a NDA violation, stating facts or one's own opinions is not something one can be sued over. It can be tried, but the counter-suit might be really expensive for M$.
Accidents happen every day but smear campaigns are easier to get away with. I'd expect to hear about how poor an employee they were and that they have been inflating the importance/seniority of the position they held and would have had no way to "see the bigger picture". Maybe there will be comments that they didn't bathe often enough and generated loads of complaints from their coworkers. Anything but a refutation of what is probably the truth.
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Tuesday 7th April 2026 06:46 GMT MachDiamond
Re: It's clear that the quality of M$ products has nosedived over the last decade
"It hasn't - quality can't nosedive if none of the software was ever quality."
Are you really sure about that?
It's like in the movies when a character laments that their situation couldn't get any worse right before the skies open up and drench them to the bone or a Rob McKenna's All-Weather Hauling lorry plows through a puddle that covers them in mud.
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Saturday 4th April 2026 14:21 GMT An_Old_Dog
Letter from MS to former MS Senior Technical Leaders
focus on bringing back senior technical leaders
"Dear former Microsoft Senior Technical Leader:
Remember how we fired your ass to save money, which we could then dump into our AI wankfest and executive bonuses?
We'd like to hire you back."
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Saturday 4th April 2026 16:09 GMT Jou (Mxyzptlk)
Re: Letter from MS to former MS Senior Technical Leaders
Reply should be:
"Dear Microsoft, are the same persons who fired me in position? I won't return unless they take actually responsibility, pay for the damage they've done from their personal pockets followed by a public dishonourable discharge".
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Saturday 4th April 2026 17:20 GMT HereIAmJH
Re: Letter from MS to former MS Senior Technical Leaders
I don't know anything about the skills of those 'former Senior Technical Leaders', but if they were truly leaders, and the problems go all the way back to 2008. then wouldn't the training that they would be giving the devs be the same thing that got them in this mess in the first place? From my experience, a swap of current leaders and a genuine focus on fixing things would probably be more effective.
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Saturday 4th April 2026 22:15 GMT david 12
Re: Letter from MS to former MS Senior Technical Leaders
Around 2000, it was clear that MS had split into a number of competing -- not co-operating -- silos. Later, I attributed this to stack-ranking, which had given MS a management class who's core competency was "not getting fired". by "getting someone else fired".
Now, MS reminds me of AT&T, of which Scot Adams said something like "ISDN could only fail by gross incompetency. It was clear that it was doomed"
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Saturday 4th April 2026 20:26 GMT Jou (Mxyzptlk)
Re: Letter from MS to former MS Senior Technical Leaders
Dave Cutler, who brought AMD64 into Microsoft, who is "Mr. NT", who concentrated on fixing bugs after Windows 2000 whereas the workstation department went a different way and released the horror of XP - you don't want XP SP0. Later he convinced them to drop Longhorn. But he is 84 now... How much senior do you want to get?
The actual NT base is, in my view, better than the unix base. The 8.x and win11 UI and other nonsense, especially once Nadella was there, is a different topic. The drop in quality, which started with corona, is still there, that infection will never be cured as it seems.
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Sunday 5th April 2026 11:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: avoided some of the not-so-good things there.
you mean like a versioning file system which DEC had been using for almost two decades by then and is still missing from almost every OS out there.
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Yes, I spent 20 years at DEC and worked with Dave Cutler on several occasions. He and a lot of his compatriots had oodles of great ideas most of which have remained ideas ever since.
Out of interest, what were the 'not-so-good things' you mentioned? I'm sure that the commentards here would love to know. MS as it is at the moment is full of 'really bad things'.
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Sunday 5th April 2026 12:16 GMT Jou (Mxyzptlk)
Re: avoided some of the not-so-good things there.
File versioning system? Shadowcopy is some sort of it. They tried a full versioning, well sort of in their database, system with Longhorn and it failed miserably.
I can imagine a "keep every version of a file" only in low IO environments, or on specified volumes / directories. Everywhere would be insane. Maybe it was planned for NT, and dropped. Similar to full Net-QoS, which is somewhat half implemented with limited API, but maybe, internally it can do more.
But I am way too young, I am only citing what he himself said in interviews. One of the things: NT was designed to be portable among architectures right from the start, VMS not. Though he did not say that was a mistake, he hinted it was simply they way it was done by the time. He also mentioned the object lists method of NT, which proved to be the right way, but he did not mention whether that was in direct comparison to VMS or other OS-es.
And this is where it ends. I'd have to be much older to know more, or would have to buy time from the grey men, so I could have 96 hours each day of my life instead of only 24.
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Tuesday 7th April 2026 05:01 GMT Eric 9001
Re: Letter from MS to former MS Senior Technical Leaders
I advise you don't go out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Instead you should install a real OS - GNU/Linux-libre.
You don't even need to purchase new hardware - Trisquel will work fine on the latest proprietary intel with integrated graphics and wired networking.
If your hardware is defective, I guess windows to the (less) proprietary Debian GNU/Linux wouldn't be too bad.
It's even a practical thing - macos supports much less software than GNU/Linux-libre.
But you won't follow my advice and you won't even partially save yourself.
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Saturday 4th April 2026 14:28 GMT Buick65Wildcat
Boeing Disease?
Sounds a lot like the “talent exodus” at Boeing that was followed by the 737 Max debacle and other massive technological failures. There are a lot of big companies in the US suffering from the same types of self-inflicted issues. Perhaps someone will at some point publish a root cause analysis.
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Monday 6th April 2026 21:09 GMT Blazde
Re: Boeing Disease?
It's a systemic problem. The root cause is a failure to value the essentialness of competition in market-based capitalist economies. The US is worst at this for a number of reasons: General corporatocratic setup with no financial limits on political lobbying and an entrenched two-party semi-democracy. Half-hearted antitrust legal history that tries to judge the effect of corporate corruption on consumers instead of just answering the simpler question of whether companies are acting in an inherently anticompetitive way. The fact that this has lead to the US being home to numerous companies whose business model relies on a moat backed up by a network effect, which is then defended at all costs by a nationalistic political body unwilling to cede that network effect to foreign companies and unwilling to see regulation as a means of mitigating the power of the network effect, both because of cultural inertia and the aforementioned unlimited lobbying. And then there's the consumer who generally thinks that because a company is big and profitable and sells products with competitive pricing then those products must be okay, which is a reasonable conclusion when we're all schooled on the logic of idealised free market capitalism driven by competition. Azure must be good, millions of customers can't be wrong? Boeing seem fine, their planes don't properly fall out of the sky that often after all, they must be doing their best or else they'd go bust, wouldn't they? (And besides the only alternative is a huge European company forced to operate to similar dynamics so who knows when their planes will start falling out of the sky, it could literally be tomorrow, let's just buy American and hope Boeing have turned a corner). And then when you're a company whose customers think and act like this, your profit-making motive forces you to constantly fire decent staff, cut costs, and see if you can take the piss that bit more than you were already doing.
Somebody will wake up eventually and realise how messed up this model is but I think we need to hit rock bottom first. There are good signs we're getting there.
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Thursday 9th April 2026 21:07 GMT witty user name
Re: Boeing Disease?
The idea that hitting rock bottom will inspire all sorts of people, including the billionaire class, to share consensus on how to proceed is pure fantasy. It’s sort of amazing people still subscribe to this line of magical thinking because I saw a lot of it around the time Trump was elected his first term.
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Saturday 4th April 2026 20:05 GMT Boris the Cockroach
Re: Boeing Disease?
quote
"Perhaps someone will at some point publish a root cause analysis."
Easy peasy
Focussing on the share price, management rewards for said share price and share dividends via the method of profits at all costs without regard for the company's core products or customers
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Sunday 5th April 2026 01:03 GMT JoeCool
Re: Boeing Disease?
It wasn't a talent exodus.
The Boeing CEO engaged in a financial engineering exercise,
which resulted in MD C-suite displacing the previous management,
and changing the product design decision making to include financial and sales factors only, to the exclusion of engineering inputs.
Ironically, exactly what M$ did, it seems.
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Sunday 5th April 2026 14:08 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: Boeing Disease?
Essentially, the problem was the McDonnell Douglas-isation of Boeing.
Boeing had been an engineering-led company and its management reflected that. In the late 1990s, they bought the failing McDonnell Douglas. *Their* management had followed the cost-cutting, short-termist approach.
Despite the fact that McDonnell Douglas had been the one going down the tubes under their former management, and despite the fact that Boeing was the one taking *them* over, the McDonnell Douglas management somehow managed to end up in dominant positions at Boeing after the buyout.
And *that's* how Boeing became infected with the same short-sighted, cost-cutting culture that had killed McDonnell Douglas and led it to the likes of the 737 Max and the position it's in today.
This article covers it in more detail and notes that:-
In a 2007 interview, Ron Woodard, the former president of Boeing’s Commercial Airplane Group, bemoaned the changes the merger brought with it. “We thought that we’d kill McDonnell Douglas and we had it on the ropes,” he said. “I still believe that [McDonnell Douglas' Harry Stonecipher] outsmarted Phil and his gang bought Boeing with Boeing’s money. We were all just disgusted.” More than that, he added, the company had “paid way, way too much money [for McDonnell Douglas] and we’re still paying for it. We wrote off so many tens of billions of dollars for that whole mess.”
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Monday 6th April 2026 05:05 GMT Jou (Mxyzptlk)
Re: Boeing Disease?
Nono, that was not Peter Principle, they exactly knew what they were doing. That was corruption, combined with giving a shit about humans, total disregard of many things most humans take for given, like being at least somewhat consistent, no total denial including self-denial 'cause of totally not giving a shit about humans, machiavelism and narcissism at its worst.
Peter Principle is "being risen up to one step beyond competence", McDD -> Boeing was not incompetence, at least not on the McDD side, they knew how to steer to their desired result, so they were very competent, but not in the fields you want them to be. Just like an executioner/deathsman/tormenter/inquisitioner is competent in a specific area... (unless the last mentioned uses the comfy chair until lunch time with only a cup of coffee at 11, or soft cushions...)
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Saturday 4th April 2026 15:35 GMT Claude Yeller
Remember Great Britain?
The UK started the industrial revolution. Up to the WWars, they were the beacon of Science & Technology. Big Tech was British Tech.
But sometimes during the mid 20th century, the British started to cut back on skill development. Their workforce were losing the skills needed to keep up their economy.
And hence started the continuous decline of the UK as an economic power house. Until the position they have now where they have to go on their knees and beg the US and India for trade deals.
It's so strange to see the USA chosing to go the exact same route to oblivion, one company at a time. Dumping qualified personnel because they simply hate good people earning money.
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Monday 6th April 2026 05:44 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Remember Great Britain?
"An employment problem of good programmers is that there are so many not-good hiring managers and HR lackeys, in so many companies, who would not understand talent if it slapped them in the face."
The move from having the supervisor/manager of the department doing the selection and interviewing to a "HR" department doing it is a problem. People in HR have "studied" HR for how ever that word might be applied rather than having any knowledge about the position being filled and what skills might be required. To me, that makes them the least qualified to participate.
While I was still working for others, I started to learn how to spot the advertisements written by HR. They tended to not use words correctly for that industry/discipline. Grammar was atrocious. They would bang on about the company more than a concise description of the role and there would be conflicting requirements. Many requirements seemed non-sensical as well. There would always be boilerplate about having lots of experience in M$ Office. When I was looking, it was for engineering roles so being an expert in PowerPoint is silly. For many years now it's a given that one can double click an icon and type words. The work I was doing would overwhelm M$ Excel so I'd use other programs such as Igor (on a Mac) for large data sets, amongst others. It was also humorous to see requirements for knowing, in depth, that company's proprietary internal software.
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Sunday 5th April 2026 09:24 GMT Claude Yeller
Re: Truly Good
"No, if they were truly good, they would still be employed."
The worst employees are those that are indispensable because you have to pay them what they are worth and listen to their opinion.
Companies prevent this dire straight by firing everyone every five years. That way, they can siphon all value to the Masters of the Universe.
In this world view, quality is wasted money anyway, so bad products are "good" value.
Enshitification is everywhere.
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Monday 6th April 2026 05:53 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Truly Good
"so bad products are "good" value."
That's down to people being constantly told that the lowest price = best value. The truth is that the lowest price is often the least value. Not always. I've purchased tools that were cheap and inexpensive that I was only needing to survive one use. Every other tool that I would be using until the end of time (time ends when I do), are most often fairly high cost. Most of those I've had for decades and are still in good nick since they are worth keeping nice and not abusing.
People that can do quality work in good time are worth much more than somebody not as good that will work for half the wage. If I take my car in for service, I want the problem fixed the first time. There's a monetary and non-monetary cost to having to bring the car in multiple times. If an employer has dispatched me to a customer's location to do a job, it won't look good to need it done over no matter the cost.
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Saturday 4th April 2026 20:07 GMT retiredFool
Re: Remember Great Britain?
I don't think that surprising. Like all great nations, they get a bit too dumb fat and happy. The US is there, and it shows. We have become an entitled bunch, and we are in downfall. China is basically where the US was in the 40's 50's. Manufacturing juggernaut. Historically there is always a rise and a fall. Egypt, Rome, Greece, ...
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Sunday 5th April 2026 11:26 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Remember Great Britain?
"But sometimes during the mid 20th century, the British started to cut back on skill development. Their workforce were losing the skills needed to keep up their economy."
No. This was my era. The 1944 Education Act raised the school leaving age. The 11-plus, however derided now, made it possible for academically inclined kids like me to get into grammar school and beyond that to University with fees paid and maintenance grants; we weren't saddled with student grants. It was when you exited the education system- at whatever stage that was - that you encountered the problem.
Having won the war we immediately started losing the peace. Bletchley Park illustrates the disease. Any rational approach would have looked at what it had accomplished and wondered what the civilian applications might have been. A good plan would have been to have kept the H/W and the team together with a guaranteed funding for, say 5 years and told them to go ahead and find out. The actual response was that the wider possibilities weren't even seen but TPTB were shit-scared of even awareness of the cryptanalysis falling into anybody else's hands that they destroyed it. The hardware that didn't go to GCHQ was broken up and the people buried so deep under the Official Secrets Act that they couldn't explain what they'd been doing during the war to potential employers let alone to anyone who might have funded commercial exploitation. Hence the development of commercial computing in Britain was left to a chain of tea-shops.
That set the pattern. Successive governments without a clue when it came to technical or industrial policy. We saw projects started and then abandoned for lack of funding. We had that liar Wilson's "white heat of technology" get no further than a speech after which we abandoned TSR2 and bought American instead - once thay'd finished flapping about to decide what to buy. That was the post-war environment into which the newly trained - at any level - was trying to find jobs.
It wasn't that Britain wasn't training people. This was the era of the Brain Drain. So many of those who were trained left to find jobs elsewhere.
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Monday 6th April 2026 06:04 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Remember Great Britain?
"people buried so deep under the Official Secrets Act that they couldn't explain what they'd been doing during the war to potential employers "
That also kneecaps some really good people that might otherwise be hired into really good job. Yes, they should remain quiet about the details of what they were doing, but why not be able to give a general notion? Peter Wright, the author of "Spy Catcher" got shafted. The book is an excellent read. Of course, I believe it was banned in the UK. Perhaps it's not anymore.
If I were to tell a potential employer that I worked on guidance systems for ICBM's, that doesn't give anything away. I didn't, BTW, but if I had and was applying for a Guidance, Navigation and Control position at a rocket company, I'd likely be in and handed a good salary after probation. There's no secret I have to keep about designing, building and flying avionics for rockets. I just shouldn't violate my NDA about the specifics even though I've not worked for the company for a fair amount of time. I'd go about much differently these days since technology has marched on and any company hiring me would likely have some preferences I'd need to work with. Contrary to much advertising, tabula rasa is almost never a thing. The only places where I have a blank slate are my own projects. Even then I'll start by listing constraints. I don't have unlimited money.
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Sunday 5th April 2026 22:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Remember Great Britain?
Skill development ?
Ah yes.
That time that the government decided that education should be paid for by those "benefitting" from it.
Let's stop educating our population because that's good for all of us. Let's instead assume that education is purely for the benefit of students.
Let's charge students and spend more money on loans than we ever spent on just paying in the first fecking place.
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Monday 6th April 2026 16:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Remember Great Britain?
The UK needed to pay back American War Loans. Apart from Hawaii and some minor Islands … all US territory completely untouched by war
Corporate America and its Industrial Military Complex did very well out of WW2. Both financial and via access to technological advances ‘assimilated’…
Computing and Electronics: Wartime research into code-breaking and ballistics trajectories spurred the development of electronic digital computers. Radar technology, critical for war, was adapted into modern air traffic control and navigation systems, while magnetron advancements directly led to microwave ovens.
Medicine and Pharmaceutical: The mass-scale production of penicillin was necessitated by the war, resulting in a technological breakthrough in manufacturing that revolutionized antibiotics treatment. Improved techniques in blood transfusion and malaria treatment also followed.
Aviation and Transportation: The war accelerated the development of jet engines and jet fighters. The "jeep" and amphibious vehicles were developed for efficient transport, changing logistics and civilian automotive markets.
Materials and Chemicals: Advancements in synthetic materials, including synthetic rubber, nylon (for parachutes), and synthetic fibers, were crucial for logistics. Other inventions such as duct tape and advancements in electronics (early plastic/adhesive technology) were also accelerated.
Atomic Technology: The Manhattan Project, aiming to create the first nuclear weapon, fundamentally changed nuclear physics and led to the creation of nuclear energy technology.
Manufacturing Techniques: The war necessitated massive, rapid production methods, influencing post-war industrial techniques (e.g., in manufacturing aircraft and ships) and accelerating the shift toward industrial automation.
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Saturday 4th April 2026 17:47 GMT anthonyhegedus
Institutional knowledge is priceless until it isn't
The real problem with mass layoffs isn't the reduced headcount – it's what walks out the door with each person. Every engineer who leaves takes years of undocumented understanding: why certain decisions were made, which shortcuts are safe, and which parts of the system will blow up if you push them too hard. You can't document that. You can't train an AI on it. And you can't hire it back at contractor rates a year later.
Microsoft has been running this experiment for over a decade. The results speak for themselves.
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Monday 6th April 2026 06:12 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Institutional knowledge is priceless until it isn't
"The real problem with mass layoffs isn't the reduced headcount – it's what walks out the door with each person."
I always say that the things that didn't work usually don't get documented. The old person that's been at the company for ages is the one that can recount those instances.
I was watching a factory show in a crisps factory and they had a worker that could troubleshoot and adjust the portioning systems faster than anybody. She could just watch for a minute and see what needed doing. It was her long experience. There is just no way to put a lot of that into sets of 3-ring binders. That factory (Walkers?) better worry as she was getting on in years. If they aren't cycling apprentices to work under her, when she's gone, that's going to cost them. I can't recall the exact numbers, but if one of those portioning stations was offline for longer than a couple of minutes, the whole line backs up and it starts costing thousands per minute until the whole line needs to shut down to clear the backup and then it's gets expensive.
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Saturday 4th April 2026 18:15 GMT weladenwow
Turning off the spigot
"As of today, 12.5 percent of all GitHub traffic is served from our Azure Central US region, and we are on track to serving 50 percent of all GitHub traffic by July," said GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov in a blog post.
Which makes it instantly possiblle to turn off access to undesirables ... think foreigners from overseas ... just a nod from the Commander-inChief ...
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Sunday 5th April 2026 03:32 GMT frankyunderwood123
copying, not innovating?
Microsoft birthed Azure in order to try and catch up with cloud computing.
Amazon birthed AWS initially for its own internal use to help resolve scalability issues.
One of these was a project that ate its own dog food and learned the hard lessons. A relatively slow and sane product iteration over many years.
Microsoft has a history of trying to play catchup and since 2008, that history has been very bumpy. Of course they played catchup many times in decades prior, but were more successful.
But from around 2008 onward is where the successes were limited. The failed attempts to get into the mobile phone industry, to emulate the success of google with android. That failure birthed windows 8, probably the most detested windows release ever and certainly the most ill fated.
Queue much tail chasing, almost a return to form by dropping a losing race with mobile operating systems and the release of windows 10, followed by a slow decay of software quality.
They are ruining github, running it into the ground. They are trying to shove copilot into every possible product. It appears they are vibe coding their own products resulting in a critical loss of quality and stability.
Yet they are so damn wealthy and embedded they are almost too big to fail, aren’t they?
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Monday 6th April 2026 14:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: copying, not innovating?
And English Electric - once an engineering giant who made a vast range of things from domestic appliances to railway locomotives to aircraft to power station equipment.
In computing, England had a number of early pioneers in the PC era, including Acorn computers, who created by far the best GUI-driven OS at the time in the early 1990s (and ARM was a spin-off).
This country does close to fuck-all now in terms of producing anything useful. There are a few niche areas of specialist industry left, and some general heavy industry (car manufacturing, etc), but much of that is now foreign-owned. We don't have food or energy sufficiency by a wide margin. And growth sectors ('management', HR, leisure, etc) do not provide skilled jobs, nor in most cases (adjusted for inflation) are they anywhere near as well-paid as a blue-collar job of the mid-C20.
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Tuesday 7th April 2026 12:45 GMT David Hicklin
Re: copying, not innovating?
> ALL huge corporate entities will eventually go away
The problem today is that they (especially Micro$lop) are so deeply entrenched into the Business environment that it is very hard to see anyone else making inroads onto their territory - and it is the Business environment that provides the big £/$ bucks for them, consumers are just noise and irritation.
I think they only way they will go away is if they do a technical snafu so big that it knocks everyone (including themselves) offline for a long period of time. They are trying their best however !
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Sunday 5th April 2026 03:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Is it not the same in all big tech?
From what I see is that MS has this odd issue of hiring as well. The peeps come from the college without much practical knowledge and get indoctrinated into this machine and subsequent bad habits that come along. Then there is a strong preference to hire from overseas (cheaper?), which does not guarantee a great technical culture they could bring despite being good engs (because they did not experience such culture yet). Moving horizontally is hard because you need to go through the same interview process which is fairer but then peeps just go outside with higher offers. Senior tech people do not have the incentives to train or help the younger ones, instead it is all sort of a competition and impact driven work. etc etc But I would suspect it is similar in other big tech companies who follow the same patterns.
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Sunday 5th April 2026 06:41 GMT Softsuits
Clock Cycles
It screams at you that clock cycles are the metric that is being sold. What are LLM Models needful of? The bumps in the night is the unavailability of the resource. Microsoft cut its teeth on server after user solutions. Any virtual solution needs more processing cycles today. Well designed and debugged modular code is the gold standard. LLM can not create programs in a repeatable manner because they are the wrong tool for that process. Look at what is being stressed in a model that was originally designed as storage.
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Sunday 5th April 2026 09:15 GMT Bebu sa Ware
So this is how the blue sausage is made.
We are warned not to inquire too closely into the precise processes and ingredients involved in the production of our familiar banger or snag — on the understanding that no one after being so enlightened could even look at a sausage let alone consume one.
The Azure banger almost certainly doesn't contain flesh from named species and the colour has… let us say… "developed."
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Tuesday 7th April 2026 07:02 GMT MachDiamond
Re: So this is how the blue sausage is made.
"on the understanding that no one after being so enlightened could even look at a sausage let alone consume one."
The way to make sausage at home is not disturbing and can be a good way to use up off-cuts. The problem arises from how greedy bastards want to increase profits by also using the tubs of bits that should be tossed out. That purple wobbly thing is not nice and very disgusting. I don't think it would be a kindness to send that to starving kids in Africa.
Just watched a show on peanut butter. I'm going to be spending the money on the good stuff from now on. Peanuts, salt and...... nope, that's it: Peanuts and salt.
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Sunday 5th April 2026 15:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Azure's problems simply stem from being a pile of shit
That's at least what the US government's security experts (back when they still had some) concluded:
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-cybersecurity-government
Of course, Microsoft being Microsoft, the revolving doors in Washington ensured that this Pile of Shit still got the seal of approval.
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Monday 6th April 2026 06:15 GMT MachDiamond
"Enshitificaiton is not JUST greed and incompetence, but that accumulation of errors that were never corrected."
I think you could put that under the "Greed" column as it often means manglement isn't willing to spend the money to correct those errors and firm up the foundations. Over time it becomes one plaster over another until there's no way to just yank one off without losing a leg.
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Monday 6th April 2026 11:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Living the azure dream
Currently working for a large multinational migrating an 8 figure a year workload to azure. We have an account manager and meetings every couple of weeks with azure. Our experience matches what's reported by everyone who has used azure and any other cloud provider - nothing scales, half the basic features don't work, you can't run a workload without being opted into multiple preview features.
We're too early in the process to know how it'll run in the end, but our guess is it'll be worse and marginally more expensive.
Writeup rings true for someone who's used azure for 3 months and is constantly surprised at the basic functional that doesn't work.
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Monday 6th April 2026 14:56 GMT Taliesinawen
Porting half of Windows to a fingernail-sized Linux chip :o
ClippyAI: Overlake is the internal codename for an early version (or generation) of Microsoft's Azure Boost offload card — a specialized hardware accelerator card used in Azure servers.
Axel Rietschin: Are you planning to port those Windows features to Overlake? The answer was yes .. the team I had joined 10 minutes earlier was seriously considering porting half of Windows to that tiny, fanless, Linux-running chip the size of a fingernail.
That felt like Elon talking about colonizing Mars: just nuke the poles then grow an atmosphere! Easier said than done, uh?
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Monday 6th April 2026 15:04 GMT Telcohack
Observation
Having seen this from the inside of one of the largest Telco providers in the world its quite common that tech organisations evolve in 3 stages... procurement lead, engineering lead and finally product lead...having dealt with MS for 30 years they still largely rely on procurement droids for rilling stuff out and have not even got to base2 yet... so pretending to master base3 is a recipe for untold proportion ahead...succesfull companies in this sector push their seasoned technology leadership on a few MBA courses and elevate that core skill to take over the product p&l with a 10 year forwad looking strategy thats scripture ... a weak product organisation just enables sales droids and weak middle managers to line their own pockets...thats at least how AWS does things, althoug lately corporate politics are starting to dilute the long term vision...
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Tuesday 7th April 2026 07:24 GMT bazza
Cloud is….
…Someone else’s computer, being run by someone else’s staff. If those staff aren’t incentivised in a manner compatible with one’s own business goals, It’s The Wrong Cloud (tm).
And given that most of the major cloud providers seem to be pretty bad wrt staff and expertise retention, they’re all hazardous.
