Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

I still find it hard to believe that so many people and companies are prepared to use Microsoft's online/cloud services.

Not ony is this a single point of failure but it's one they've no control over whatsoever. Same goes for Google/Youtube etc. It's as risky as flying a passenger jet with only one engine.

What are they thinking, why are they prepared to risk everything?

It boggles my mind.

Most companies enter into a contract with Microsoft. That is infinitely better than using a 2 person startup that runs out of a garage. Contracts come with strict terms of service, SLAs, service expectations and such.

If you had a restaurant, would you source your produce from your trusty friend who grows vegetables as a hobby or from an established mega-farming-company?

I would sure want to dine in a restaurant were vegetables were grown out of love and not as a profit making machine above all else.

Do you consider the same single point of failure to use AWS?

There's a pretty significant lower bound of size to where you can reasonably have multiple points of failure. And like oh well if you use this stack you could theoretically move at any time isn't really the same thing as being multi-homed. I've been at places where this has been a concern of the leadership but the economics of it have never really worked out compared to spending your time working on anything else related to the business.

No, I'd never use a 2-person startup, that's silly and irresponsible. I'd keep my services in-house and use multiple companies to store backups as I've done for decades—as we all used to do before the renting/leasing software (ripoff) model.

Nor would I ever use software that lives on a remote server that I've no direct control over.

Let's hope Trump does more blocking, it's the only way to wake up a lazy sleepy world.

BTW, isn't 'infinitely' somewhat of an exaggeration?

Software from big companies can be made with love too?

but are they? on average? how do you measure this?

it's pretty easy to talk to a solo-dev or gardener

It's a simple opportunity cost calculation. The service is there, provides value. Creating a replacement is not realistic. Paying for another replacement gives you potential headaches from using a less popular service. So when choosing between not doing a thing or doing a thing with the risk of spof, it's often a reasonable choice to go with those services.

Ironically appropriate example. Many of the most famous restaurants in the world, like Noma [1], are famous precisely for sourcing ingredients that bypass mega-farming. At Noma many of the dishes are based on the produce provided from local foraging.

And contrary to what you might expect from its presentation/reputation, the place itself is just a building surrounded by green houses and a guy growing and harvesting most of his own stuff. It's an extreme example, but the issue is fairly typical at nice restaurants.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noma_(restaurant)

I'm not really sure this is true. Big companies find themselves with a big problem by the nature of their own weight. To simply exist they need to see revenue in the millions, if not billions of dollars. So everything rapidly becomes about money. That, in turn, equally rapidly leads to rent-seeking as a goal, which just generally turns everything into a dystopia from inception to production to launch.

It's easy to talk to Microsoft employees too.

It's cheap and it works well. Also integrates into everything related you'd need.

> If you had a restaurant, would you source your produce from your trusty friend who grows vegetables as a hobby or from an established mega-farming-company?

You sure you like this analogy? Every ambitious restaurant (Michelin stars, World's 50 Best, that type) uses small farmers to try obtain higher quality produce.

It's chain restaurants and shitty family restaurants that use the large suppliers.

Yeah, and many of these best restaurants in the world barely make a profit, compared to Olive Garden or McDonald's.

But yes, I'm with you here. I also like Noma way more than Olive Garden.

Also, if you're a small business without a dedicated tech team, what are your options that don't involve relying on a single big company?

Speaking for myself, running a bakery, I chose MS 365/Teams with regret but accepting that there's nothing else out there with the same value proposition except maybe Google workspace.

They have regional pricing so we get everything for the equivalent of $3.50 per user. Basically no other apps offer regional price - Slack alone would cost about $8 a user.

This includes chat, calls, messaging, 1tb of onedrive space per user, calendar, planner, emails, office, plus loads more.

Sure, it's janky but it basically works. The only thing I've found with a close value proposition (still slightly more expensive even if I limit to just a few gb of space per user) is self-hosted Nextcloud, which is about the same level of janky and requires a tech person or team to set up.

I am not sure if a company that doesn't need a technical team even needs that technical overhead?

No reason to not just host email with any domain provider and manage the rest with a small NAS in the office.

Not only cheaper and taking away the update obligations of Microsoft. Which I am sure kills more productivity than managing a Synology server.

Example?

If it's locked within AWS and you have no way of moving out fast I definitely would consider it a single point of failure.

Kind of a tangent, but a lot of brick and mortar business is far less profitable than most think. A McDonalds franchise owner is looking at ~$150k/year profit on average. And with lots of other fun stuff like the fact you don't even own the property, it's rented from McDonalds. And that's going to likely trend downward as McDonalds continues to put the squeeze on franchisees and labor costs continue to rise.

And far from passive income, there's a joke that buying a franchise is basically buying a job and not just any job - but a stressful, thankless job with terrible working hours. And the price tag for this new life of luxury starts at around a million dollars.

Storage is far from the highest priority. I do store quite a bit of files for marketing but those only need to be accessed by a few people.

Also, much as I wish otherwise, very little happens via email in this business. It's all chat apps now.

The important part is cross platform real time communications, calendar, and office. Some kind of kanban board is a nice bonus.

> No reason to not just host email with any domain provider and manage the rest with a small NAS in the office.

Sounds like even more of a single point of failure, just on your domain provider (who's much more likely to go out of business) than Microsoft. And one with no chat, or phones, or conference calling, or shared calendars, or endpoint management, or SSO, etc, etc.

Just sticking all your data on a cheap NAS in the office works for a few people, although it becomes PITA to do granular permissions when you don't have any proper central authentication. But then it's also a massive single point of failure, so you need to implement a backup solution, and then a way to share files outside of the organisation, and then a VPN so that people can work remotely, and then some monitoring so that you know when a disk fails....and that's getting way beyond what a non-technical person can manage.

It's fine if you're just using it for your hobby. But building your business on top of something like is very likely to come back and bite you in the arse.

Synology does all that, they even have some kind of office suite (haven't tried, I would just use libre and a central storage)

Synology is also setup and keep running for years usually.

It's just an example tho. I just don't see any need for a Microsoft cloud solution for a small company (or anyone really)

You go to those restaurants for a boutique experience. You can't run an enterprise based on whatever your suppliers have available on the day.

What do people consider as NAS? A Network Harddrive? If you buy a "normal" Synology Nas it comes with shared calenders, office, VPN control, several backup options including Aws and Azure and a lot more. Typical setup and forget setup, thanks to their high package quality.

And I am sure there are even better options than a household Synology.

But putting everything in a cloud and fully depending on a single provider that for the majority of people is in a foreign (and politically dangerous) country is definitely not the obviously better option.

There's a demo on their website:

https://demo.synology.com/en-uk/dsm

Well yeah, that's what a NAS is. What you're talking about is just self-hosting a all-in-one server, like people used do with Windows Small Business Server, and all the problems and limitations that comes with.

And plenty of small businesses and hobbyists do that, and then after they "setup and forget" it they get compromised or lose their data a few years down the line.

> The only thing I've found with a close value proposition (still slightly more expensive even if I limit to just a few gb of space per user) is self-hosted Nextcloud, which is about the same level of janky and requires a tech person or team to set up.

I would not imagine storage to be a major cost with something like Nextcloud. They major cost is going to be the tech person to set it up, and you do not need that many hours to do it. Mostly an initially one off cost will be high, and big upgrades might be a lot of work, but maintenance should not be

> That is infinitely better than using a 2 person startup that runs out of a garage.

The big advantages with the 2 person startup are

1. A small business a customer who matters to them, and you will get better service

2. You can get terms such as having control of backups, hosting of your choice, and access to systems so you can get someone else to maintain things

> Contracts come with strict terms of service, SLAs, service expectations and such.

How close do these come to covering the consequential losses of an extended outage?

Yes and no. I've been in companies with windows business servers that were a constant pain to manage. Whereas the modern NAS, Building on stable open source software mostly offers the 'just works' experience people are looking for + the business grad documentation.

Why would using a NAS (or small server) mean ignoring any basic logic (and business requirements) and not having off-site backups?

SBS server "just works" if you just set it up once and then ignore it, your requirements never change, and and don't do basic things like maintenance and installing updates as well.

People absolutely should be setting up offsite backups. And more importantly, testing them so that they can prove that they work. But if they have no technical team then neither of those things are going to happen.

I was mostly pointing out it's a bad analogy.

That being said, maybe the "small supplier" side of IT is actually OSS + in-house engineers?

I personally think Google workspace is better for small business. I think filesharing/permissions/synchronization is much easier and more intuitive across machines and employees and since everything runs in the cloud if you have say, iPads for the POS they can also use Google everything pretty easily.

Google Sheets is IMO also much nicer than Excel and for small business you don't really need to deal with Excel lock in.

That being said, the price you got seems unreal.

I've already set it up and we're running a test with 4 users since about a month now. I'm hosting it on Hetzner VPS with storage on Wasabi, backups on Backblaze. You're correct that storage is cheap. Compute and ram are the main costs, and I'm not sure how to quantify that until/if we run with the full team of 30 people. My current setup of 4 dedicated vcpus, 16gb ram is massive overkill for 4 people, hopefully it's enough for 30.

It's currently at around the break even point compared to MS Teams. I think maybe $5 a month more expensive all in for the VPS, storage, and backup.

It would be cheaper if I could run on Arm but unfortunately Hetzner doesn't have that in their Asia region yet.

Yeah, we were just starting out and really needing to keep every possible cost down when I chose MS. Looking back I definitely wish I'd paid a bit extra for Google Workspace though, it does look much better suited for a business at our size. Plus, I just cannot get people to use MS Office, they're constantly sharing Google sheets and docs around. Habits are hard to break!

Teams is much better suited for a company with 1000 staff and a tech department. Admin is massively overcomplicated. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20 I guess.

> That being said, the price you got seems unreal.

We're in Vietnam, and like I said, regional pricing. It is a good deal, but doesn't look quite as unreal from over here. Really wish more companies would do regional pricing, $8 a month for slack, $10 for notion and so on is basically a no go for a small business here.

Not in my experience.