Japanese businessmen don’t fuck around, and they wait for no one.
Japan keeping fax machines around suddenly looks less like resistance to progress and more like disaster recovery planning. Microsoft spent years selling the future of work, only for a paper tray and a dial tone to become the high availability tier.
Old salaryman in boardroom: “This meeting could have been a fax.”
I’ll guess any business grade copy machine can also do fax without much setup. Old protocols don’t just vanish. It was only microslop that went down, that shit is just not needed that badly.
📠
I think I’ve read somewhere today that Germans did the same.
Yes, how we love our fax machines. 🙈😂
In the context of current events, it seems a practical and smart crisis planning step. Especially useful for hospitals and institutions to secure a necessary data flow.
It seems to me far wiser to spread services more widely across several providers. Seriously: how daft is it to buy email, instant messaging, video conferencing from a single provider?
Microsoft builds its ecosystem around vendor lock-in. You’re using Entra? M365 integrates real nicely with that. Oh, you want to use something else? Well, good luck with that, our documentation is so piss poor even CoPilot won’t be able to help you. And once you drink the M365 kool-aid, now you have Exchange, Outlook, Teams and Office. You also get afflicted with SharePoint as a bonus! Good luck justifying anything else to your management.
Honestly, I don’t see how MS hasn’t fall afoul of EU anti-trust laws, again. They have bound everything up so tightly that you’re lucky installing Windows doesn’t obligate you to a lifetime of M365 subscription costs.
Interoperability becomes an issue though. FLOSS and federated systems help there, but we all know the big providers aren’t going to play ball. Unless we rebuild the whole stack from the ground up, proprietary systems are always going to try to funnel everyone into vendor lock-in and platform monopolies. This is the end result of choices that were made 30 years ago, based on assumptions that didn’t hold up, but none of us now dealing with the consequences, had any say in making.
Yeah, but a physical backup service in critical areas like fax could remain too.
