In a twist of irony, Steve Jobs’ scathing 1995 critique of Microsoft has resurfaced as the company grapples with a major Windows outage affecting millions, including commercial services such as airlines.
Microsoft responds to outage
Microsoft Inc. attributed the error to a recent CrowdStrike update and announced ongoing efforts to restore affected services. In a detailed post on X, the company stated, “We are working on rerouting impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate the impact in a more expedient fashion.”
Jobs’ critique re-emerges
As Microsoft races to resolve the issue, a nearly three-decade-old interview with Steve Jobs has re-emerged and gone viral.
In the interview with tech journalist Bob Cringely, Jobs stated, “The only problems with Microsoft is that they have no taste… they have absolutely no taste. I don’t mean that in a small way… I mean that in a big way. They don’t think of original ideas and don’t bring much culture into their products.” …
you say, ‘Well, why is that important?’ Well, proportionally-spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. That’s where one gets the idea (and) if it weren’t for the Mac, they would never have that in their products,” he explained.
“And so, I guess I am saddened… not by Microsoft’s success. I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success… for the most part.”
“I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.”
Root cause and resolution efforts
According to Microsoft’s Service Health Status updates, the preliminary root cause of the outage is “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads (that has) caused interruption between storage and compute resources, resulting in connectivity failures.” These failures impacted “downstream (and dependent) Microsoft 365 services.” CrowdStrike Engineering, a cybersecurity firm working with Microsoft, identified a content deployment related to the issue. They have reverted the changes and posted resolution steps for affected Windows users. Critical services worldwide, including police and government agencies, have been impacted.