A "Sponsored Story" has appeared in the NZ Herald written by Microsoft and touting how their new datacentre 'could' drive 'billions of euros worth of investment' and create 'thousands of new jobs'. It has received a lot of positive feedback on LinkedIn(1) of course. While I applaud investment in New Zealand I don't think these claims stand up to very much scrutiny for the following reasons.
A zdnet report on the Azure AD outage in mid march... Pretty ho-hum you might think... normal cloud/IT problems. The real issue with this which people don't seem to understand is that nearly all New Zealand Government public service agencies are in a headlong rush to run everything in Azure and as a result of this outage were unable to function... Couldn't log in, no Teams, no email, no documents, no calendar and of course, no contingency plan. A significant part of the New Zealand Government, dead in the water and relying on a single US multinational to get it going again.
I truly thought this old SCO lawsuit had been killed off, dead and buried, never to see the light of day again but no... It has risen again. ArsTechnica has the details here for those of you interested enough in reading it... Short form: nothing new and will fail again. Most likely an attempt by the venture capitalists at the helm to make a quick buck, which was the original SCO strategy as well... didn't work then. Won't work now.
