Microsoft hit by cloudy downtime in US

Ahhh cloudy services

99.9% uptime.

Sorry we want the golden 5 nines please.

Used car salesmen

You get what you pay for, and Microsoft is more than happy to take your money and give you shit support and cheap solutions.

No backups - who needs backups when you've got "the cloud"?

I've spent more hours in meetings than I am really comfortable admitting with the assholes from Redmond that sell and deliver BPOS. Out of all the Microsoft BPOS sales/leadership I met there was only one guy who understood service delivery - the rest of those idiots might as well have been selling Zunes or XBoxes... services and technology are two different things, and you need both to make a solution. Microsoft doesn't get that.

So they will come in, they will dazzle their prospective clients with low Low LOW PRICES!!!!1!!11 and at the end of the day the clients who bite on it typically wind up with a more expensive, lower quality solution than they had before. There's a reason why it's cheaper and prospective BPOS clients should thoroughly understand what they're buying before they sign.

There are, of course, situations where cloud makes sense - but Microsoft BPOS doesn't really want to be bothered with clients under 5,000 seats which, IMO, is getting into the ballpark where cloud solutions really don't make much sense vs. on-premise.

There are many types of clouds...

You don't have to knee jerk about this. Plenty of other providers manage 5 nines hosting of Exchange. That Microsoft can't is well, completely understandable really, given Microsoft nowadays..

Perhaps some of these customers

will, in fact, look skyward - but take care that the right ascension and declination of the object they are seeking will better meet their needs....

Henri