As Microsoft battles global disruption, Steve Jobs’ “third-rate products” scam

New Delhi:

Microsoft makes “third-rate products” – Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ scathing assessment of the Seattle-based software giant from 1995 went viral on Friday as the company battled a major Windows outage issue that affected millions of users, including commercial services like airlines.

Microsoft Inc. said the error was due to a recent CrowdStrike update and that it is working to recover all affected services. In a detailed post on X, the company said it is also “working on redirecting impacted traffic to alternative systems to alleviate the impact in a more convenient way.”

Meanwhile, as the company races to resolve the issue, an interview Steve Jobs gave nearly three decades ago has resurfaced online and been widely shared.

“The only problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste… they have absolutely no taste. I don’t mean that on a small scale… I mean that on a large scale. They don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture for your products,” Jobs told Bob Cringely, the technology journalist.

Steve Jobs on Microsoft – They make third-class products. Today many people would be feeling this.#Microsoft#blue screen#Windows

pic.twitter.com/IYnKvGaFaf

– Ashutosh Mishra (@caashutosh22) July 19, 2024

“…you say, ‘Well, why is this important?’ Well, proportionally spaced fonts come from beautiful typesetting books. That’s where the idea comes from (and) if it weren’t for the Mac, they would never have that in their products,” he explained.

“And so, I guess I’m sad…not about 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 third-rate products.”

Microsoft Cloud Outage Explained

According to Microsoft’s service health status updates, the preliminary root cause is “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads (which caused) disruption between storage and compute resources and which resulted in connectivity failures…”

NDTV explains | What’s causing Windows’ dreaded ‘blue screen of death’?

These flaws affected “downstream (and dependent) Microsoft 365 services.”

CrowdStrike Engineering – a cybersecurity services company working with Microsoft – identified a content deployment related to this issue and has rolled back these changes and published resolution steps for affected Windows users.

READ | Windows systems restarting, generating ‘blue screen of death’ errors

Services, including critical providers such as police and government, across the world have been affected.

Microsoft services affected in India

In India, SpiceJet said it was facing “technical challenges” that affected online ticket booking and check-in, as well as other functionality.

“Passengers with future travel plans are asked to arrive at the airport earlier than usual to complete check-in at our counters,” the airline said in the X.

READ | Microsoft ‘Blue Screen of Death’: Full list of services hit in India

New airline Akasa Air and industry veterans IndiGo have put out similar messages. Flight services at Chennai and Mumbai airports have also started getting affected, sources told NDTV.