Another Round of Adventures in Microsoft Incompetence

Experience Preamble

I share this as preamble that I am not a newbie to the incompetence and foibles of Microsoft, and many other companies.

But oh my goodness!

Microsoft 2023-2024 has taken incompetence in their support of their core products, 365 and Azure, to a whole new level!

I have been online and involved with tech since 1979, beginning around 8-9 years old with programming, and what would be "Internet" access through connections at the University of Utah, and BBSes. I had my first paid programming gig, a Point of Sale, custom software for a video rental mom and pop shop, around 1982.

I have used scores of operating systems, including Windows, and I acquired MCP, MCP+I, and MCSE back around 1998 (in addition to many other certifications from many other companies and technologies).

While I have had to support tens of thousands of Windoze computers myself over the years, I have never been a fan.

In my experience of around more than 30 years dealing with Microsoft's product support, they have generally been very poor. And I often found and fixed issues they didn't even know about. And I found huge security holes in their products that they denied,denied,denied, and then decades later accepted as being self-evident.

Somehow though, they seem to have only gotten worse with their support, not better.

I loved my Amiga 2000 for some time even after Commodore died.

AndI lived with Mac well enough, and many BSDs, especially OpenBSD.

And I enjoyed a number of UNIXes, IBMs, VMS, VMAX, Wangs, and others.

But Linux is by far my favorite because it has become by far my most productive and preferred OS.

I've been running on Linux since 1994 (even though it was very painful in those days, the benefits outweighed the pain even then).

So the contrast every time I have to switch gears and come back into the MS world, is really striking.

I have worked for companies as official vendors and partners for Microsoft at various Tiers for over 25 years, including officially being 365 providers through Intrinium, Interlink Advantage, and others, in the 2010s.

I have more than a decade's experience with AWS, and bit less with GCP, as well as building our own private cloud in my home and at the RPG Center using Xen for more than half a decade. So I am not a "cloud" newbie either.

The Situation Setting Up the Adventures in Microsoft 365 Incompetence

At the beginning of 2024 I accepted an offer for another position, while still CTO at ManufacturingPower, and founder/CEO of RPG Therapeutics LLC, and founder/Executive Director of RPG Research, I added to my repertoire of positions as CTO at PracticingMusician.com, and one of the first adventure there was migrating them from Godaddy's Microsoft 365 Tenancy to Microsoft's. They had been trying for several months and been getting nowhere, so I rolled up my sleeves, dusted off my MCSE (never expires) from 1998 knowledge and experience, and dug in. Here are some highlights from the adventures that ensued...

I literally performed an entire tenancy migration 100% without any useful support from Godaddy or Microsoft (especially not Microsoft). Even though everyone tried for several months before I joined, and made no progress.

I am still incredulous, indeed dumbfounded, about the whole fiasco, and the 8+ unresolved (by them) tickets, and complete lack of competence from MS. :-(

I have a lot going on, but this was quite entertaining, and I really want to share with everything the shennanigans from Microsft's utter lack of support, and how I was able to force the transition 100% by myself thanks to finding out that nothing really changed in over 20 years since MS migrated to "the cloud", everything under the hood is the same.

I am very busy with everything, so I'll have to try to have time to come back and continue writing this when time permits. Oh the logs, emails, are hilariously sad.

Details coming soon (when time permits).