Comment by Quothling
19 days ago
Having worked in non-swe enterprise for two decades I would argue that this is less true today than it was 10 years ago. It used to be that new hires would come with a basic knowledge of windows and office, but that's no longer the case. At the same time, you have things like Smartsheets and so on, which are more popular, at least with our employees, than Excel and everyone seems to hate Outlook these days. I don't think it was ever really the case though. What Microsoft sells to enterprise is governance, and they really don't have any competition in this area.
Being in the European energy sector we're naturally looking into how we can replace every US tech product with an EU/FOSS one. It's actually relatively easy to buy the 365 experience through consultants which will setup a NextCloud, Libre/Only Office, Proton and a teams replacement I can't for the life of me remember the name of. Beneath it there is a mix of Identity Management systems, often based around Keycloak, at least for now. It works, from what we've seen in Germany (specificlaly with their military) it's also possible to roll it out relatively quickly. It's all the "other" stuff that gets murky. There isn't a real alternative to AD/Entra, yet, from a governance perspective. There are great tech solutions which does the same thing, but they require a lot of IT man hours. Something the public sector is always going to be more willing to deal with than the private sector. If we collectively decided that trains in Denmark should be free for passengers, then that would happen. You can't do that in a private business, though security obviously does factor into it.
This is the general story really. Microsoft's copilot studio is relatively new, and it's probably been flying under the radar in a lot of tech circles because it's basically what power automate always wished it could be. Having used it to build a HR flow, where an AI model will receive the applications, read them, auto-reply to irrelevant ones, create a teams site with files and the relevant people for the relevant applications, and invite the applicant to their first appointment. Well... I gotta say that I'm not sure what we have that's an alternative to that. It took me a couple of hours to build it, and it frankly works better than I thought it would. Granted, I did know the tool because I had previously done a PoC where I build a teams agent which "took over" my teams interactions. Everyone noticed because it spelled correctly and wasn't capable of posting Warhammer 40k ORK meme's in any form of quality, but it was frightenly easy. What Microsoft sells in this area is again the governance of it all. You can do these things because of how EntraID lets you connect services seamlessly with a few clicks. While behind the scenes all of those clicks are only available to you because your IT department control them... Again... without hundreds of manhours.
I'm sure we'll eventually get there, but it'll likely come down to change management. Because even if you're willing to retrain your IT operations crew, it's not likely that they will want to leave the Microsoft world where they are well paid and job-secure. Well, maybe I'm in a cheese bell, but I've never met an Azure/Microsoft IT person who would want to work with something else, and having been forced to work a little bit with it behind the scenes, I sort of get it... well not really.
Which boils down to why Microsoft has always been good with enterprise customers. The decision makers in your organisation will listen to everything, but their own IT departments will often sort of automatically recommend Microsoft products and at the end of the day, it'll all boil down to risk. Which is what Microsoft really sells... risk-mitigation. Sure their licenses are expensive, but is it really more expensive than losing your entire IT staff? (this isn't an actual question I'm asking, it's what goes through the considerations.)
This probably reflects my own prejudices, but it always struck me that MS based IT people wouldn’t work with anything else, basically because they couldn’t.
That stack optimises for not really having to understand what you’re doing, but also avoiding any major foot guns (and having the general arse covering that buying IBM used to provide, but which MS now does). The price you pay is that everything is horrible to work with. But if the alternative is not really being able to get anything done at all then so be it?
The Windows ecosystem does a lot of things that, to me, as a Linux/MacOS user, seem like a weird bunch of crazy decisions that are different just because.
Whether that's true or not, it does mean that a lot of people who came up on Windows IT don't have a mental framework for how to run or manage Linux systems. Likewise, when I'm trying to diagnose something on Windows it just seems like the entire thing is a disaster; where are event logs? In the event viewer! How do I filter them? It's a mess! Can I search them? Kind of! Do they have information to help me diagnose the problem? Almost never!
On Linux, I know all the tools I need to solve all the problems that come up; on Windows, I have only minimal concept of how things work, and very little way to diagnose or debug them when they go wrong, which is often.
For example, when my Windows gaming machine comes out of hibernation my ethernet controller insists that there's no connection. I can't convince it otherwise except by disabling the device and re-enabling it. I can't figure out where I might find information that tells me why this is happening, so I just wrote a powershell script to turn it off and then on again. I bet some Windows IT dork could figure it out in 30 seconds, but I'm a Linux IT dork and I have no clue.
> For example, when my Windows gaming machine comes out of hibernation my ethernet controller insists that there's no connection. I can't convince it otherwise except by disabling the device and re-enabling it. I can't figure out where I might find information that tells me why this is happening, so I just wrote a powershell script to turn it off and then on again. I bet some Windows IT dork could figure it out in 30 seconds
Windows and Linux dork here (heh). It has to do with how various computer manufacturers implemented the Sleep/Standby State (S3/S4), how they've resisted implementing a common standard at the hardware level, and how Microsoft eventually gave up arguing and patched around it with their own Modern Standby system in the S0 state.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
Tbh, though, the only computer I've ever seen Hibernate work well on are Macs. Every x86 computer usually has some sort of issue with it, except for maybe business laptop models (eg HP's Elitebook line).
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> ...an AI model will receive the applications, read them, auto-reply to irrelevant ones...
You're probably breaking EU law by building this nightmare.
https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/86/
All that law says is that the applicant 'shall have the right to obtain from the deployer clear and meaningful explanations of the role of the AI system in the decision-making procedure and the main elements of the decision taken.'
And even then, only if a job application rejection 'produces legal effects or similarly significantly affects that person in a way that they consider to have an adverse impact on their health, safety or fundamental rights'.
So as long as the company is recording the decisions taken and the reasons for those decisions, and providing those to candidates on request, they're in the clear.
I doubt that they are, but maybe!
If they're using a LLM to make those decisions, then they're fundamentally unable to provide the reasons for those decisions, because of how LLMs work.
Not to mention you can't trust that the AI is actually filtering out applications properly. I've run into that myself when I was responsible for hiring at my last role. The AI solution my boss insisted we use was awful. It highly rated completely unqualified applicants and ignored the few good ones.
> Which is what Microsoft really sells... risk-mitigation. Sure their licenses are expensive, but is it really more expensive than losing your entire IT staff?
There's an old saying in IT that was pretty popular in the 70s and 80s: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
You'll notice that nobody says it anymore.