In this context it would presumably mean not casually deleting your customers' data.

When people say a company is unserious they almost always mean that they're not thinking about, and taking seriously, the work that their customers do. This seems like a classic example of that.

Backups!!!

Dependable.

Not the person you’re responding to, but I’d say serious here means committed to delivering value for customers, willing to take lower profits in the short term to be steadfast and reliable, deeply introspective about process (with transparent communication).

Just, you know, taking business seriously. Like they did even 6 or 8 years ago.

The core business now is execs ego-stroking each other and hoping disaster strikes after they cash out.

When Satya came in there was a dramatic shift in culture, and things were improving. I won’t argue they were super-serious, but at least getting better, and focusing on the business rather than the internal strife that Balmer loved to much.

But now… just the opposite. This IS a deeply unserious business. The tech bros got the keys to the combine and have no idea WTF to do, so it’s all cosplay.

competent, wishing to be competent, and not having your leadership suffer a psychotic break with reality: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...

producing an os with a focus on utility to end user would be a start. Even just something that makes some form of effort to give users a return on investment on their hardware. Right now, you unluck massive headroom, battery life, and stability, on a laptop by simple putting linux on it. All that despite windows enjoying better all around driver support from manufacturers.

A serious company would never have allowed its core product to turn into the clown show it currently is, yet here we are, a massive corporation pushes an OS that feels vibe coded, and is largly propped up by what little residual community goodwill/ignorance exsists.

It's just an internet meme phrase. "X is not a serious Y" just means that X is a joke.

It's a dumb phrase and overused in contexts like this.

Selling backup for data that is stored in the cloud (whether selling solution as a provider or selling any solution (even free one) internally to your team), is one of the hardest things in the world.

No.

Just because an entity is able to do things with serious consequences, does not mean they are a serious entity.

For other examples, see school shooters in the US.

I really highly doubt that. The way Microsoft uses the “for business” branding is not in an IRS/legal way to distinguish between for-profit vs nonprofit entities. Rather more like “Discord vs Slack” or “a subreddit vs zendesk” type offering.

“For Organizations” would really have been a more appropriate branding. Governments around the world, including the US government, used plenty of “For Business” software from Microsoft. However, the “for business” branding tells you where the money came from.

So a nonprofit would almost certainly be on a “for business” subscription type. That is to distinguish it from a “for students”, “for home”, or the default “for one person” subscription type.

It really can't be understated how many non-profits operate on a shoestring budget and over-extend that few staff they can afford as a standard operating procedure, and have very low technical skill among everyone as they're mission-focused with what little resources they have.

I've worked with and for a couple non-profits where IT help was someone's spouse or kid or brother willing to help out. Often I've been the spouse. Often a shared Google drive filled with poorly managed PII is the solution that works well enough...until something bad happens.

Maybe I am in echo chamber, but none I know exercised recovery plan… ;) except of power plants and othe critical infrastructures, and maybe large enterprises. Others imho use 3–2-1 approach but haven’t tried to recover data.

Sure 90% of internet is foam of days.

A non-profit I help out sometimes, was affected, and I have to say the emails were not that clear. Because it's hard to figure out what is part of a license, the free tier etc. I let it lapse, because we migrated of Office, but apparently the license also applied to Intune.

Fine, so I bought licenses but apparently Microsoft deletes "some" of the data. All groups were still there, users and the device ids.. but not the devices themselves. I could see all devices associated to a user but couldn't recreate or restore them in device management. Thus, I had to re-enroll multiple devices. Will migrate off Intune in the future, since it's garbage but haven't found a good alternative for Android devices yet.

If 150,000+ organisations were caught by surprise, I would say it’s clear whatever communication they had was not adequate.

Organisations that didn’t have an off-boarding option (do nothing, pay the minimum, I’ll deal with it) selected should receive monthly reminders, then every 2 weeks (to multiple people), and one per week until a VERY alarming one the week before. And, of course, have all systems shut down and the data archived for a grace period.

I hope they sue Microsoft for what seems neglect.

Does that mean it is 170000 * 10 * 3 = 5,100,000 per month (assuming 10 users per org)? Isn’t that less than found in the cushion level money for a trillion dollar company?

I wish they’d just use clear and blunt language, rather than “strongly advise” and “to avoid.” I’m reminded of my bank sending “Important account information” mail that contains advertising OR actual important information, but at like a 20:1 ratio.

“YOUR FILES WILL BE DELETED ON {DATE}” seems like it would have solved any ambiguity.

That's some real nightmarishly passive-aggressive wording. It reads to me like the kind of thing intentionally structured to leave people confused until after the deletions are already done, so then it's too late to argue about the free service being removed.

> the official support channels in Microsoft are broken

I can say, from first hand experience, the very best cloud providers have support channels that are, at the very least, unpleasant to use.

Governments. Many housholds, I guess over 50% in many countries.

It's a cancer.

For more info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285418 - "Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data" - 229 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333344 - "Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data" - 75 comments

They lost data because of their incompetence and not actually having any backups.

And today you can buy a 20tb drive for under a grand.

False: they did not lose the data; they temporarily lost access to it, because of Iron Mountain's security policies. They are, necessarily, pursuing remedies in court. They can and will regain access.

Microsoft wouldn’t have a business if there weren’t so many fools around.

Also, libreoffice is just unequivocally worse than MS Office - it is actively painful to use their spreadsheet, for example.

Nope. I actually care enough to make this statement. Using such subscription products and then getting rug pulled isn't something easy for non technical users.

So just start with sovereign, better governed products with clear transparent pricing and better affordability to begin with.

Data interchange formats are more important than ever, and having programs that don't do too many things is just as important.

Not everyone starts thinking about Google Docs or WebDAV to begin with, and actually ... LibreOffice does a decent job here.

https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/...

Don't bring up imaginary problems on Linux that people don't have. Losing access to accounts on a computer or a cloud service due to skunky companies is totally happening today though.

I was a Financial Analyst at Amazon and Starbucks for about 15 years total. Excel was my favorite tool. I used to say that if my employer would not pay for Excel I would pay for it out of me own money.

Almost 20 years later in 2026 I migrated all my personal stuff to Linux and Libre Office. I am amazed how much better this is than the Windows + Office setup my wife uses.

Just today I helped my wife with an Excel file. I can’t believe what garbage Excel is in 2026. For reference- I tried to use the Formula -> Show Dependent Cells feature. This feature showed NO dependent cells - even though these were in the row below. What a piece of garbage Excel became.

Right. Well funded corporate IT environments losing access to their data because Microsoft screws them over. Perfect. That's not what I'm reading here.