Opinion As Microsoft approaches its 50th birthday next year, it can look back with satisfaction at having created the first era of universal corporate computing, and of having ridden successfully on the coat-tails of the second.

It is one of the companies that pop in and out of the quantum state of richest in the world. And if ever an outfit qualified for full understanding of its market, it's Microsoft.

So when it causes what looks like random suffering to its customers, we must assume it's deliberate. The infliction of deliberate, needless suffering would be abuse, a serious charge, but the possibility bears serious examination. Most recently, we have the case of Redmond telling its customers that the connectors and webhooks that link Teams to Office 365 are going away over summer, and everyone now has to switch to Power Automate. Just another old system deprecated to make way for the new, surely?

Not so, argue the users affected. There's no need for the change, it's going to cost them for no advantage, and forcing a quick transition over the summer when so many staff are on break is just cruel. The pain is intensified by what the technology actually does - it helps create and smooth workflows within organizations. To mix immiscible metaphors, it's the glue that binds everything together and the oil that keeps things flowing. Breaking it breaks so much for so many. Transition has to be absolutely necessary and meticulously planned.

Microsoft has excuses, like this change is needed for security and stability. This is the first anyone has heard that connectors are neither scalable nor secure - please tell us more. Hello? Hello? Charitably, that has to be the normal marketing spin when a company wants to forcibly push people off platforms that were previously the best thing since America discovered craft beer. Create a problem and sell the cure. Yet that doesn't explain the urgency or the feckless timescale: some might even speculate that there has to be some internal Microsoft milestone for departmental revenue, or perhaps a regulatory reason. There was no customer voice within a lightyear of that sign-off.

It's not an isolated incident, either. Your correspondent lent a sympathetic ear to an Azure dev the other week, where they were trying to create a data flow within an Azure Data Factory pipeline. Hmm, there's that flow again. They couldn't make it work: one part of the system throwing up an error when presented with a perfectly good input that worked elsewhere. The internal debug help didn't, the documentation was out of date and useless, and support? "Hah!" Senior heads were scratched, all search options exhausted, and in the end the Azure "solution" was abandoned.

This is not an abnormally incompetent dev, any more so than those who are reacting in horror to the implications of the dead connectors. This is not an unusual story, nor has it been in all the decades Microsoft has been helping itself to corporate cash. There can be no economic justification: however you do the sums for providing good support that respects the customer, it won't come within a parsec of the money spent on failed mobile strategies or pointless mega-takeovers.

The result is real abuse of real people - as, shockingly to much of the world and seemingly to Microsoft, developers are real people. The damage done to project timescales is real enough, but so is the mental harm in frustration, overwork and burnout for those fighting the tools that should be helping them. This isn't snowflake wokism, it's a fact, and it doesn't have to be like this.

It is not unreasonable to ask someone who is hurting you to stop it. When that someone has all the power and money in your world, such an ask becomes more than reasonable, it is compelling. How to get the attention of Microsoft and its many fellow travelers in corporate callousness - that's a good question.

The problem is that the only legal relationship Microsoft has with corporate devs is the license, created to minimize the vendor's obligations. Keeping promises to developers does not feature. Not even on the radar. It could be, if client companies wanted it, but you may have noticed developer happiness isn't always on the internal radar either.

Fun as it would be for thousands of devs to take Big Tech to court for mental abuse, that ain't gonna happen. What's needed to start the ball rolling is what behavioral psychologists call a nudge, consistent pressure to make people feel uncomfortable about bad habits. Over time, this can escalate into stronger pressure, and eventually into changes in the law that would have seemed impossible a few years before. Think about smoking or careless driving.

Microsoft and its ilk get away with bad behavior because it's never seen as a bad habit with cumulative effects, just repeated chronic isolated acts of bad faith. Let's start keeping count, as the state keeps count of bad driving. Microsoft works by licenses, so let's start giving it boots for violations. Every day lost because documentation isn't valid? A point. No help from support? Point. A service withdrawn without due care and attention? Lots of points.

Such a scheme would need common and reasonable definitions of bad behavior, and enough people playing the game. Given that, though, the steady accumulation of points will be impossible to ignore. Adding, of course, the cash cost per point to aid the upward pressure through the system towards those who sign the contracts.

Nudges change minds, and changed minds change laws. Laws that stop companies harming their clients are nothing new. So let's start that conversion. It's very far from pointless. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/15/opinion_development_ms/