Cynicism Justified

Most people’s reaction to my recent post suggesting no one cares about software quality was that I was wrong, and it did matter.

I wrote that just before the Microsoft outage. Everyone is talking about it. Its affecting a huge range of services, not just relatively unimportant email delivery, but also hospitals, emergency services and transport.

People are clearly willing to live with it.

Cloud services are generally more expensive than old fashioned on-premises services, and they are less reliable. Reliance on a few big American suppliers is the opposite of much talked about sovereign technology.

That is all apparently fine. It means IT can offload responsibility and say just pass the buck to Microsoft, AWS, or whoever has messaged up this time.

Neither are there any consequences for the suppliers. If a car manufacturer kept producing unreliable cars, people would stop buying them. With technology, people keep happily buying.

In all the discussion I see about this outage I see no one saying that they are ever reconsidering their reliance on Microsoft. The markets do not expect any consequences. Microsoft shares closed up yesterday. It is Crowdstrike all over again. With no impact on revenues or share prices the lesson the company will learn is that they do not need to care about quality.