Your analogy is spot on except there is a MS webby Excel. The goal is to get you totally in the cloud and by you I mean all their customers ... all of them.

On prem Exchange is being made as wanky as possible to run and has been for some years. Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom for that other than give them: "death by a thousand cuts".

We have an all in one Exchange box so no fancy stuff and it really is painful to watch updates and there is no technical need for it. Its not even a subtle nudge. I've had updates take multiple hours.

I'm old enough to remember when email (let alone the www) didn't exist. MS were eventually very clever in the '90s and noughties and have kept on top of things since. They don't have a total monopoly but quite a decent slice of the "market". The goal is silo off users in their cloud. On prem does not make them anything like enough cash.

They will lose a few customers to Linux and Apple but the full on subscriptions model will more than fix up the finances.

Just wanted to chime in and say it’s nice to see someone from IT on the site. I love the site and can follow a lot of things but feel like it’s mostly developers here.

There are a lot of non devs here ... a lot.

We just let the kiddies crack on and widdle in public but we are still here!

I should point out:

Every now and then you will note a comment here that looks a bit more ... insightful than the rest - it might be bollocks or not. Search the username etc. or follow the threads and someone will eventually note who made it.

You will find some remarkable people hereabouts. The rest is the usual noise of any other social.

>Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom

Technical reason is they don't really want to do them and they are difficult to get right. Office365 does not run Exchange updates, so they don't get properly exercised. The only reason they haven't dropped support for in place updates is customer screaming but trust me, Exchange team would love to.

Proper Office365 way to update Exchange is build new machines, patch them fully, install new Exchange version and move all the mailboxes over.

Is that the proper way in EXO? SPO had individual file replacements. SharePoint stamps were not pave-and-build.

For Exchange it is. Microsoft officially puts out patches for Exchange and technically patching is supported, it's just Exchange Online does not do it so it's poorly tested and when working with Microsoft 8+ years ago, they told us to rinse and replace. I developed a bunch of Powershell scripts to do it before I stopped being Exchange admin.

Ah I thought you were referring to EXO the service, not Exchange Server. Yes, Exchange Server has been a full ISO deployment for many years, now.

Well speaking for myself: the reason why I keep using Microsoft stuff is because I grew up with it. The first computer that I owned came with 98SE. At this point in my life I do not really want to learn new programmes.

But if MS keeps changing shit I may as well move on to new horizons.

interesting data point. someone born in the 90s thinking like someone born in the 40-60s... i guess the 70-80s generation really misplaced a lot of hope on the latter generations on these matters.