Reasons to avoid a proprietary monoculture (again)

Yet another tiresome example of why relying on a single company for your software suite is a Bad Thing(tm). The US Government has issued an urgent directive for all of its agencies to update their MS Exchange email systems after Microsoft was compromised, apparently by Chinese operatives...

I don't know a) why anyone is surprised by this given how often it happens or b) why governments (especially New Zealand) and business continue to rush towards Azure when it is the same bug ridden codebase.

Actually I do know the answer to b)... one of the selling points is the alleged integration with other MS products and a seamless deployment... which is almost but not quite true and, as we have discovered, also enables cross platform root exploits.  

How about the New Zealand Government actually spends some money locally to enable a seamless work experience for open source solutions for central and local government while stimulating the economy instead of sending it offshore where it is lost forever.