I was going to make the fact that Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft tools are down into a Red Meat Friday post with a title that included the word “schadenfreude” but my better nature prevailed and I forebore. Today, though, I saw this: they’re still down. To be fair, it appears to involve more than just Microsoft so it’s probably a network issue of some sort.
Nevertheless, this inconvenient fact remains: if a critical part of your company’s workflow depends on an Internet connection to operate you really should reconsider your decisions. Sometimes, an Internet connection is unavoidable but it certainly shouldn’t be for basic operations like word processing. Who benefits from the need for an Internet connection? Hint: it’s not the user.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of open source office suites that are free to use and don’t require calling home to work. There are many companies and even governments that are using them today.
The whole thing reminds me of the old adage that “No one ever got fired for choosing IBM”. It was never true, of course, but it did express the widely held sentiment that IBM was the safe bet. The same doubtlessly holds for Microsoft but it’s even less true for them. Their software in no more robust—often less robust, in fact—than their competitors’ offerings that aren’t phoning home all the time to check your subscription or make sure that what you’re writing meets their terms of service as Google Docs famously does.
The general rule is easy to state. Anything critical should operate—and most importantly, store data—locally. Sure, some apps will need a connection to complete their task—WordPress for blogging is an example—but they shouldn’t need that connection just to start using the application.
Of course, I’ve been preaching this for years and people still aren’t listening. I don’t expect that to change. To be clear, I don’t insist that you have to use open source software, only that if the Internet goes down or the company goes out of business, you can still get your work done.