Comment by moksly
5 years ago
In the public sector in Europe we’ve long liked Microsoft because they actually sell support. When they decided to push 365 additions as enabled by default and no easy way to turn it off, we suddenly had a couple of thousand employees trying this new teams thing out. After a few hours on the phone with Seattle, it was possible to disable, and later Microsoft changed policy to let their enterprise customers decided what features are on. We have a lot of those stories, and it’s something people often overlook when they wonder why the public sector favours Microsoft. We have more than a quarter century of great relations.
When AWS first arrived they had the same automated support system that Google does, and they didn’t really want to comply with GDPR. We probably would’ve gone with Azure anyway because it’s the easy option for operations when you’re already in bed with 365, but the Amazon/Google attitude meant they weren’t even considered beyond the first look.
Since then AWS has overtaken Azure in GDPR compliance and the availability of their support, and we now have several supplier operated solutions in AWS.
Google is still on the “do not buy from this company” list.
But maybe they just aren’t interested. They are primarily an advertising company after all.
Not a big Microsoft fan in general, but I will say, I can agree with their support being great for commercial customers.
A couple years ago, there was an update that affected a bunch of embedded devices and caused some machines to go down. Luckily our machines were on an older version, but another shop we worked with got hit by it.
Within an hour of Microsoft being alerted to the issue they'd begun working on the problem and within two hours machines were back up and running again after Microsoft pushed an update.