Crowdstrike won’t be the last Global IT Outage. Although Crowdstrike is not innocent, the outage fundamentally results from Microsoft’s approach to technology.
Microsoft has created a tech culture, with Microsoft Windows at its centre, supporting myriads of hardware and software companies, developers, and almost the whole IT support industry. They all exploit the inadequacies of the central product to sell to the public and businesses yet more products and services – solely to keep us all updated and secure.
This bad situation will make our globally connected world fall flat on its face unless Microsoft changes its game! Because we rely on the deeply faulty Windows system, another Global IT Outage is imminent. The next Windows operating system should not allow ANY third parties, whether evil hackers and viruses or even security companies, to be able to alter its core functions to the extent that it will no longer boot, whether by accident or design. Windows should be hardened and inviolable. In contrast, all non-Microsoft functions should be sandboxed and dispensable. Microsoft alone should take responsibility for their operating system, er…, operating!
I am an Apple fan, and I hope what I have described as an objective for Microsoft is close to what Apple already does. Even if I am mistaken, Linux does this in some of its many iterations; for instance Fedora Silverblue and its immutable OS.
However, being an Apple fan gives me no reason to feel smug. I feel as vulnerable as everyone else is to a Global IT disaster. Microsoft is ubiquitous in almost all we do online today. Please Microsoft, ditch your reliance on the IT tech culture. Stop farming out responsibility for patching holes in your Windows system as business opportunities for other companies and players, creating a tech ecosystem that keeps Windows going. You are now too big to fail. Because when you fail, you now fail all of us.