I’ll take that as a sign that Right to Repair advocacy and legislation has begun to bear fruit.
It's more likely a sign that whatever OEM they decided to use this time just went in a slightly different direction because it made things easier for them, or they are aiming for the enterprise market that Dell and Lenovo occupy (and where things like "FRU replacement" manuals and labeled screws are still the norm.) MS has lobbied heavily against RtR in the past and I don't think that's changed.
It’s probably also in preparation for EU legislation on the area. Microsoft is a major player in the EU public sector and for good reason. They are one of the best IT-business partners you can have as an enterprise organisation on every aspect which isn’t necessarily technical, and their tech isn’t exactly bad either. What is the “realistic” alternative to most of their 365 platform? I say “realistic” because it’ll need to be used by people who can’t tell you if they are using iOS or Android when they need support.
I’m guessing that part of staying on top of EU enterprise in general is being EU compliant, it’s a lesson AWS quickly learned from Microsoft as their support area went from Google to Microsoft in like half a year as they realized it was the only way to get in on all those billions.
> What is the “realistic” alternative to most of their 365 platform? I say “realistic” because it’ll need to be used by people who can’t tell you if they are using iOS or Android when they need support.
Google's Workspace or whatever they call it this week. It's not really better than Microsoft in any aspect, but covers enough features and is familiar enough (most people probably had a Gmail at some point) to everyone.
Right until you need support. Microsoft's isn't great, but I don't have to create a new account at Bing's ad department and shove a few hundred bucks into it to guilt trip them into unblocking my old O365 tenant because a haywire AI accidentally closed it down, and that's the only department with something occasionally approaching customer support.
Used Workplace at my last company. (Paid of course.) I don't have any visibility into how IT liked their support but it seemed like a pretty good service--especially over time. Even Chat and Meet seemed more than adequate although they basically cut over to Slack if only because a good subset of the company insisted on using Slack whether officially or not.
There is a world of difference between the Microsoft you do business with as an enterprise customer and the Microsoft you do business with as a private citizen or a small organisation. When you’re a big enough customer (and this can be with 5000 employees) you’ll get calls directly from Seattle with updates on major incidents on half-hourly basis. Meaning your CTO can tell your organisation that they know there are issues but that Microsoft a keeping them updated. You’ll also get different prices on things in Azure and the 365 platform, bundle licences, access to have changes made in core Microsoft products (if it’s not unreasonable), get compliance product owners who’ll try to get your local legislation to go through and so on.
With Google there is no difference if you’re spending $100 or a hundred million a year. You still get to talk to the same chatbot. Except for Google education which is ok.
Not that it really matters that much as Google likely wouldn’t be a realistic choice for anything because of how tough the EU legislation is on keeping data within the EU. I think AWS is still the only giant US tech company which is compliant with only having EU citizens work support on the infrastructure of EU customers. Well, Microsoft has probably caught up, but if they have it’s taken them a long time to do so.
Personally I think it’s a little sad Google can’t seem to get it right for EU enterprise because their education suite is actually very affordable and easy to use for EU schools. But despite it being the one area of Google where they seemed to understand how to actually sell it to EU enterprise, it’s still having major issues over privacy concerns as the advertisement part of their company just can’t stay away.
This is about a 20,000 person global organization with large EU operations. For smaller EU organizations, I expect Google just doesn't care very much and that may be an increasing trend with US companies to the degree that EU regulations run counter to how they want to operate elsewhere.
I’m guess Google took it serious enough after all. They recently made an agreement with the 98 municipalities of Denmark which will allow our schools to continue using Chromebooks after the summer.
I’ll have to adopt my comments in the future. It only took them like 5 years, but they got there.
Also left, now at telecom Lumen (merger of Level3 and CenturyLink) https://news.lumen.com/ryan-asdourian : "Ryan also led Business Development and Marketing for the Microsoft Surface business group in the United States"
Perhaps unrelated, but it feels like Microsoft exists in a zone where anything good is by perceived to be by accident, while anything bad is by intention.
It's more likely a sign that whatever OEM they decided to use this time just went in a slightly different direction because it made things easier for them, or they are aiming for the enterprise market that Dell and Lenovo occupy (and where things like "FRU replacement" manuals and labeled screws are still the norm.) MS has lobbied heavily against RtR in the past and I don't think that's changed.