They could've split it into smaller e-mail services in stead of designing one monolith for the planet.

I mean it's e-mail.

[delayed]

Every service becomes a monolith if it becomes popular enough.

Its not "email"

Its all connected

M365 is a suite. Make a 365 email and you also make an account in Entra, connections, onedrive, sharepoint, teams etc etc etc

Its not "just email"

I was digging through Teams API calls the other day and found some references to Skype in the responses. It’s all connected indeed

Skype for Business was previously Lync, which is what the teams voip components are based on. (Teams is essentially a lync/sharepoint client.)

They just one day decided to rename it Skype for Business while making it incompatible with Skype because brand synergy.

Its also a giant pile of shit.

Teams - absolute garbage OneDrive - clunky garbage Sharepoint - massive pile of shit

When Microsoft has an outage it tends to be global. They don’t seem to learn institutionally how fault tolerance should work across a planet. All else- I wait for the postmortem to critiq

I don't have very much forgiveness, perhaps only for those junior engineers tending the beast they grew, and which now has indigestion. No-doubt there are all the usual machinations of large corporations at work. Tech companies are no better (in some ways worse) than "normal" companies, because of the invisible complexity of software. Brooks, Ousterhout, and Stroustrup were not fools. But MS run a service, they get freedom to choose how it is engineered internally so long as it continues to present a service interface to the users/client apps/other internal and external services. This is an incredible level of freedom to choose what you engineer for. MS always had the ambition to serve the world with this service. It doesn't seem like they engineered accordingly. It's easy to knock them, but I think they must have made some significant wrong choices.

I'll spare readers the full anecdote, but I worked for the company running the largest mail service in the southern hemisphere, and at the same time a few of the large mail services in the northern hemisphere in the 1990s. We met with the Exchange team who wanted us to adopt their product. Where we could run a given service on 2-3 servers, Exchange sized by MS required 300 of them for just 1 of our countries. Fortunately our cash constraints prevented us going down that road. They offered the license for free and exerted pressure on the C-level, as you can imagine there were heated conversations and some choice language between mgmt and engineering on this topic.

> They offered the license for free and exerted pressure on the C-level, as you can imagine there were heated conversations and some choice language between mgmt and engineering on this topic.

Thanks to AI, heated conversations between management and engineering is mostly a thing of the past. Unless the engineer wields an outsized influence, they will be shown the door and replaced with a lower-priced AI-augmented engineer. Which might explain the increasing frequency of shitshows we are seeing lately.

>Does having 400M users and 1B emails per day factor into your forgiveness?

No.

Because of the infinite resources premise and because there exist email services of that scale that are reliable. Email is not an unsolved problem.

The rest of your comment does not make much sense to me ...

>1B emails per day

Jesus, make sure you stay away from signal processing if this trickle of data scares you

Just for a sense of scale, on a single CPU core that is something like 1M instructions per email. ONE CPU CORE.

and it's all done automatically by a dedicated device, what's your point?

No, and I've been discussing this with a friend today.

Internal software goes through rigorous change control, change windows, change freezes around key business dates, etc to minimize risk.

Then you sign up for some SaaS and they blow out email (which aside from security needs 0 updates lets be honest) midweek, mid business day without warning or reason.

Unlike other cloud systems, for email there doesn't seem to be any additional complexities, any dieconomies at scale, no? You could in theory run 100,000 domains as 100,000 separate email services. It's not like social media where everybody is looking at and interacting with everybody's posts. And the email algorithm is well established, it's definitely easier than, say, settling financial transactions.

>does having 400M users and 1B emails per day factor into your forgiveness?

Trillion dollar companies shouldn't even be able to have excuses.

You have infinite money, stop fucking up.

I heard someone threw half a billion dollars at an election and couldn't change people's minds. A company having a bunch of cash doesn't automatically get people to do the right thing. Especially when the priority at every turn is shareholders.

Cash can't fix culture.

>I heard someone threw half a billion dollars at an election and couldn't change people's minds.

hard to change the minds of a bunch of pissed off folks when your political campaign funding is pushing AI ads about transfolk and not grocery prices or datacenter rollouts.

You're arguing that the governing structure democracy cannot accomplish things with money. That's true, but for completely different reasons. The analogy doesn't really work here because Microsoft is run by a CEO and is functionally a monarchy without any need to persuade anyone beyond their paycheck.

Someone else threw the same amount of money in the other direction. Your comparison would make sense if there were a second trillion-dollar company spending their entire budget on trying to make Outlook go down, which is not the case. But we do all know that your goal wasn't actually to make an apt analogy, and just to shove your political whining into an unrelated discussion.