/chronicle

Wouldn’t it be nice to envision a day when you never have to use a Microsoft application or operating system again? The outfit from Redmond wouldn’t still have most of the world hooked to their licenses or O365 subscriptions if not for just one tool in their box. It’s not Active Directory, Outlook, Teams or even Word. It’s Microsoft Excel.

No other application has experienced such universal corporate adoption as Excel. No spreadsheet alternative can compete. Arguments can be made for Google Sheet’s capabilities but there simply isn’t an application in existence with more universal adoption across business departments than Excel. First introduced by Microsoft in 1982, it was a harsh knockoff of Dan Bricklin’s VisiCalc which I’m old enough to have actually used, Ugh. Excel wasn’t even popular until 1987, taking a back seat to Lotus 123 on DOS based systems. Then along came Borland’s Quattro Pro. As someone who learned C+ development on Borland’s “Turbo C” I attest that’s one company I wish was still around.

Excel really took off in 1993 at the release of Version 5.0 which for the first time introduced Macros thanks to the inclusion of Visual Basic for applications. Microsoft’s never stopped developing Excel, making it the dominate the CP/M market. That’s “Control Program for Microcomputers” which is exactly the type of app category it fell into, along with Visicalc, Lotus and Quattro Pro. They were not originally called “spreadsheets”.

Flash forward 40 years and Excel is used to design everything from Gamma Radioknife Neurological Surgery procedures to Roller Coasters. Even Excel Power Users don’t realize Excel became it’s own programming language in 2021, considered “Turing Complete” with the addition of LAMBDA function, meaning you can now write any computation in Excel Formula Language. I personally use this feature to write Microsoft SQL queries using Excel functions.

While there is a ton of criticism I personally throw at Microsoft almost daily, I will concede that for the job it does, nothing does it better than Excel. Due to Microsoft’s unwavering commitment to advancing Excel for 40 years I don’t know that anything could catch it now. This is why no matter what direction any company takes, I can’t imagine an accounting department that will settle for anything other than Excel, insuring Microsoft will always have at least one license bought an paid for by damn near every company on the planet, if not every business computer user in the future.

I’m pretty certain the complicated resale initiatives in the software industry began as an attempt to thwart pirating. It’s turned into an unmanageable mess benefitting software resellers over target customers. Everything has to be purchased through a “partner” now. Never mind there is no “partnership” between your company and a VAR beside some sales guy trying to get paid. It’s implied these resale hurdles are meant to provide “consultation” and inform the customer. What if I’ve already adopted the application or platform and just want more licenses? Many software development companies understand the madness of the reseller model and have moved to online sales and self-service. But not enough of them.

Take Connectwise and their flagship remote support product, Control. Jake Morgan and his team realized the absurdity of the reseller model even back in the ScreenConnect days, opting to sell DTC. They still do. It’s pretty easy to add Control seats as opposed to Sophos for example, who decided to make it damn near impossible to buy or implement their products. Ironically it’s a lot of security outfits who are failing on this front. CheckPoint acts like their product is too good to sell to anyone without blessings directly from Israel. Their arrogance is off the charts, price be damned. They don’t even want to talk to small customers and won’t even provide renewal purchases from quotes generated in their own portal. I genuinely believe the Israeli CheckPoint team is so arrogant they literally do not want money from a segment of potential customers.

A lot of C Levels in software companies believe making their product hard to procure makes it more important or more secure. Meanwhile a big reason Cisco’s lost so many customers hasn’t been exclusively due to competition but because they won’t end the decades long joke that is Smart Net. “Nobody ever got in trouble for buying Cisco”, until now. Overly complicated and non-intuitive, I find Cisco ios devices easier to configure using a shell and decades old commands. For this Cisco still demands an outrageous premium. Their VoIP phone system is horrible and overpriced compared to RingCentral or Vonage yet they double down on being difficult and expensive to procure.

These days I look for ease of purchase as a qualification in software selection. The modern industry’s failure to deliver is a big factor in the selection process today. Doesn’t matter if it’s intuitive to use, simple to deploy and effective at it’s job, if licenses are hard to buy, involving many reseller quotes and electronic delivery delays I’ll go with the competitive solution that isn’t. It’s a problem software development companies brought upon themselves and until they start listening to those purchasing their product the industry will continue to decline in innovation and effectiveness. From SMB to Enterprise sales the industry is failing to accommodate customers and increase revenue.

In 10-15 years more people will be watching YouTube than any major over-the-air TV network or streaming service. Our kids go to YouTube first and as Google aggregates content for YouTube TV there won’t be a competitive network.

In the past week I learned the RingCentral Outlook Add-in for Outlook won’t work anymore. Microsoft conveniently and intentionally broke that. It goes right along with them forcing a Teams Meeting link into every meeting scheduled in Outlook. Sure, this can be cut off in each individual Outlook instance but it’s a Powershell struggle to remove it across a corporate domain. All to force us to use Teams.

Now I just learned Teams doesn’t support using Apple Airpods in meetings. This is absolutely absurd. I didn’t think they could do something to make me hate Teams more.

I wish more C Suite executives understood the creation of Teams was nothing but a Microsoft temper tantrum. Slack wouldn’t sell to them for a billion dollars so, in typical Microsoft fashion they weigh the cost of anti-trust lawsuits against revenue they can earn by forcing their product onto everyone using Microsoft office.

Now I’m in a position to make a call on what software is deployed to hundreds of workstations in a billion dollar company. I’ve supported Microsoft workstations, servers and domains for over 25 years. We are slowly moving to Macs on the desktop. As few Microsoft Office/O365 products as possible will be used going forward, possibly just Excel if I can get there. But it’s expensive. We’re moving to a Zero Trust network without domain authentication as quickly as we can get everything into the cloud, to Infor M3, jumping away from our locally deployed Dynamics GP ERP system.

Why are we working our way from Microsoft as much as possible? Their never ending and relentless push of this work collaboration platform, forced on a user base: Microsoft Teams. They may not lose in court but I am going to personally do all I can to make sure they lose revenue. Sharepoint isn’t much better from a security and administrative perspective.

Update: I’ve also recently learned that Teams has a habit of hijacking AV peripherals without releasing them for use by other applications. So I guess that answers the original question, yep.

All of them. When you find that blog post claiming production efforts meant to create virtual events that don’t suck, they’re lying. Comparing virtual boredom to in-person trade shows and meetings shouldn’t even be done yet meanwhile charlatans trying to save their trade show businesses stay busy coming up with half-ass reasons virtual is better. These same people can’t wait for trade shows to resume so they can quit selling obvious bullshit.

People email me invitations to virtual events, eager to get their marketing out any way possible. There has never been a greater waste of electricity or bandwidth.

One of the top articles I’ve ever read regarding ransomware and recovery was written by a Russian out of Boston, Maria Korolov. Since the majority of ransomware attacks originate in Russia I suppose it helps to speak the language? Only thing I’d add to her article is to emphasis NEVER keep backup appliances authenticated to a domain and never allow Active Directory authentication onto them. Any AD authentication should be TO the destination file or folder path on the source server using a designated AD account. Nothing should ever be allowed to authenticate onto the appliance or backup server using AD authentication. The initial harvest of AD credentials, used to perform most ransomware attacks, makes AD authenticated backup systems vulnerable. To date I’ve brought two enterprise environments back on-line within 24 hours post-encryption, no ransom, no keys with zero forward facing downtime to customers or vendors using locally authenticated backup appliances. The information in Maria’s article lays out how it’s properly done.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3627828/ransomware-recovery-8-steps-to-successfully-restore-from-backup.html