Steve Jobs was the last tech CEO who didn't care about wall street and only care about quality products and consumers saying that if customers are happy, then the share price will take care of itself. But most companies are share price first, customer later.
This sounds like the crux of the issue. The combination of: "tool can be used during analysis" and "analysis takes long" shifts the barrier of rejection from "is this tool safe?" to "is this tool so unsafe that we're willing to start a fight with a lot of other government agencies to remove it, find an alternative, etc?".
Not criticizing FedRAMP. Proper security review takes time. And probably more when dealing with vendors.
They know that if they get entrenched first, it's impossible to migrate away. That's basically free money from a customer that has zero cost ceiling.
Thats why you have Windows in the Pentagon instead of something secure.
The article talks a lot about conflicts of interest, but this is the line I went looking for. A bureaucracy fighting itself over goal prioritization, and what's a necessary roadblock vs red tape is the less sexy but more meaningful problem at the core of this.
Once the government decided they wanted the product, they were going to find a patsy.
I on the other hand have no expectation, and so it's not clear whether the "bureaucracy fighting itself" is a cause or a symptom. You're implying it's a cause and the solution is "less red tape". But it could be just a symptom of conflicts of interest, and less red tape just leads to more efficient corruption.
Again, you're just reading into it what you already believe in.
Right.
You bet.
Absolutely.
The government has historically, routinely, consistently, solved problems more complex than cloud computing.
The only way you'd think otherwise is if you had some other motivation to pretend otherwise... some sort of ideology.
You can customize the way you want. After configuring it, my colleagues could not log in. Thats one way to secure your organization.
This sounds like LinkedIn.
I think LinkedIn spam is worse than being in a crash.
I don’t understand how they have non-zero market share.
Then you've got the hell of overlapping permissions systems on the console and the Microsoft account, to get any amount of online play working on a console if you also get Bedrock. On the Playstation, especially, the error messages also love to not tell you which of the two systems is blocking you, so you get to guess. And Microsoft's site for managing those permissions is so confusingly-laid-out that even after doing it three times in a row I still felt lost on it.
I never did solve the problem of getting Minecraft Java Edition to run on a kid's MacBook with allowlist-only Web access. It wants to contact ten or so apparently-randomly-selected-from-an-enormous-pool IP addresses on every launch. I never did find documentation of which IP blocks I needed to allow, and couldn't guess at it from the IPs themselves. If they'd just used domain names... I must have manually hit "allow" during a launch twenty times, and it was still presenting me the same number of prompts every time, because there was no overlap in the IPs contacted (adding insult to injury is that I'm sure all but at-most two of these were spyware horse-shit that had no actual generously-necessary role in running the software, but it'd fail if it couldn't reach them)
Youtube was always involved, somehow, for some reason, even when what I was doing wasn't connected to Youtube at all or the account I was using had never even been intentionally used with Youtube. It'd route me through a few Youtube domain names.
(Microsoft's is indeed even worse, on some of theirs [Azure Devops, looking at you] I can't use them in pinned tabs because somehow they manage to get into a totally broken state where the page won't load due to whatever's happening with their auth flow in the background, and no method of reloading the tab fixes it, and it does this every couple days—but copy-pasting the same URL to a new tab does work)
- FB's move fast and break things. Constantly launching new libs.
- Linus's we do not break user space. Great commitment to backwards compatibility.
- Never deprecating dead products until they've been de facto abandoned for like decades.
This combination means every MS product is a labyrinth of overlapping APIs with no guidance as to which one is actually the good one. Some are abandoned garbage, some are brand new and incomplete, and some are both, and there's no way of knowing which are which even experts can mislead you.
You're just forced to use vendors and if you actually care about the mission, it's just a different team on the same mission.
Of course you know you're being taken advantage of, and long-term maybe you should have gone to the non-technical side to fight it, but at the end of the day you just want to keep the young boys being shipped off to war safe, and you're much better suited to achieve that by remaining on the technical side.
...or so I've heard.
(That seems to be the main complaint, that Microsoft never provided the clear information required to conduct the assessment properly).
For example, our state government says "We will do X Y and Z which all require data science expertise, but we did not approve the $60k a year Data Science position, so instead we are forced to hire a Data Science contractor for $120k a year, and they can't really be fired, and they are terrible at their job"
And then people wonder why things suck all the time.
A lot of state's buy their Obamacare marketplace service from a company I am familiar with. That company is entirely incompetent. They cannot follow basic instructions. They cannot triage a bug at all. They do not read freaking tickets. They take weeks to respond to an issue. They cause bugs regularly in ways that imply they don't have functional source control. They continually fuck up basic feature requests. They change the service in ways that contravene the literal law. The law that was comprehensively explained to them by people I know.
But they can't be fired, because the state is legally compelled to provide this service, and is not really allowed to hire a few engineers to build it in house. They could go to a different software contractor, but all the options are just as bad because it's an entirely captured market.
Obama started a "Digital Services" group in the federal government to actually build systems internally and develop expertise to mitigate some of this, and they built stuff like tax filing solutions for free for Americans. So Trump killed it and hollowed out it's corpse for DOGE.
I would warn anyone far and wide to avoid Azure at all costs, especially if you are a startup. And especially if you are doing any kind of AI because the only GPUs they have available are ancient and also crazy over-priced.
If I cared more, I'd try to migrate away from Azure. But I don't, and that's probably Azure's business model at this point.
Building in house.
Outsourcing to consultants.
The alternative was AWS, which has been operating at every classification level for over a decade at this point. It's now split between Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and Google, which is especially amusing because Google withdrew from the original bid process when they were still pretending to give a shit that their employees don't like working for the military.
Maybe the critical question, are they making continuing improvements? Especially to merge conflicting functions.
Like when they bought Minecraft, or Skype. Each already had user management. Xbox was a mess. Merging them all took a lot of years.
I'm reminded of Storm-0558 [1] where a stolen signing key was able to forge authentication tokens for any MSA / Azure AD / Government AD user. They downplayed the severity. Just imagine if that level of access was used to pull a Stryker on a nation-wide scale. That is an economic disaster waiting to happen.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/07/14/ana...
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-ent...
> Microsoft on Friday revised its practices to ensure that engineers in China no longer provide technical support to U.S. defense clients using the company’s cloud services.
Ref: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/microsoft-china-digital-esco...
Just to be clear, I'm responding to the parent comment not the article.
I'm convinced Amazon has many teams crapping out new features but they don't have the political clout (or manpower) to create a comprehensive product. They are mandated by management to use existing services, and thus we the users suffer because we have to manage all this extra crap and noise just to enable basic functionality.
It's maddening. And then also it's maddening to see another service from a different team that was able to throw off these shackles and actually make a product that is self contained. You get a taste of how good things could be, and then you're thrown right back into the IAM/SQS/Cloudwatch/Cloudformation/Policy/everything else under the sun soup.
That's total "normal" for Microsoft at least from 2018, the year I started working with some of their products (Power BI mostly). They adopted a development model that is early release, fast iteration, and users as testers. No wonder everything feels experimental until much later.
Back then I just couldn't use Power BI. But fast forward a few years, I think it got a lot better since maybe 2020. You just have to stick with it for a few years.
So, you have to be a paying tester? Incredible that MS can keep enough businesses as hostage to be able to operate like that.
People who take Azure up without previous MS product experience...not sure about those.
Also see: SharePoint
We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it.
We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now got Fabric which I guess is the new Synapse. I wouldn't really know because I probably have five different systems that I use that basically do large-scale data processing, and yet Fabric isn't one of them; who knows, maybe it will become the sixth?
We've had numerous internal systems for orchestrating jobs, and it wasn't until Azure Data Factory that we finally released something externally that we sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really use internally. (To be fair, some teams do use it internally, but we're not all rowing in the same direction.)
I regularly deal with multiple environments with different levels of isolation for security. I don't even know how it's all supposed to work -- I have my regular laptop and a secure workstation and three accounts that work on the two. Yet I have to do some privileged account escalation to activate these roles; when I'm done, there's no apparent way to end the activation early, so I just let it time out.
These things are but a fraction of the Azure offerings, but literally everything I have used in Azure makes me absolutely HATE working in the cloud. There's not a single bright side to it AFAICT. As best as I can tell, the only reason why Azure makes so much damn money is because Microsoft is huge and can leverage its size into growth. We're very much failing up here.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/big-dat...
Decades ago, Lotus 1-2-3 on top of MSDOS was the lever; today it’s GCC High.
Hah. First time looking at FedRAMP?
The real reason for this, of course, is accounting, it moves it off of the government's books.
hn_acker•2h ago
> Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They Approved It Anyway.