Just to be clear within the analogy: are you expecting the auto manufacturers to "force-eject" any hotel on Park Ave that has a record of valet mishaps? Or did you mean individual cars should force-eject the valet?
If a Caesars Entertainment property in Macao has enough incidents, should GM update the firmware on their automobiles to force-eject valets at Caesars Entertainment properties in Las Vegas?
Now imagine that GM actually operates valet services in Macao and Las Vegas. Should they be allowed to force-eject valets from competing services?
I am not a Microsoft apologist. I think they should do better. I think Linux and FreeBSD should do better. I personally avoid Microsoft products. But I place more blame on people who use MS products than I do on MS. After all, I never intend to hand my beat up old Corolla over to a valet so why should I have to pay for a "valet mode" feature that Toyota is forced to build into all their cars? Isn't it reasonable that motorcycles, 18-passenger vans, and scooters don't need "valet mode"?
In my book, the auto manufacturer is lower on the list of culprits than the valet, "the establishment that keeps a valet with an abominable record on staff", and the vehicle owner. But some place like Car and Driver could definitely prioritize encouraging GM or Toyota to develop valet modes over berating owners; so I don't mind a place like HN shooting a few arrows at MS. Unless the general public follows their lead and lets bad guys off the hook by shifting too much focus to somebody lower on the list.
> Just to be clear within the analogy: are you expecting the auto manufacturers to "force-eject" any hotel on Park Ave that has a record of valet mishaps? Or did you mean individual cars should force-eject the valet?
Not OP, but I think the analogy here is the hotel "fore-ejecting" (firing) the valet with a history of doing joy rides. That seems very reasonable.
In the analogy, it seems Microsoft is a car manufacturer. The hotel is the company that bought software from CrowdStrike. The problem is that Microsoft should not control who has access to which APIs, that is a huge can of worms, and actually called anticompetitive by the EU from what I understand. At MS level, either they publish APIs or not. If published, anyone should be able to write software for them. This is especially bad if MS themselves also sell security software that uses the same APIs. It would literally mean MS deciding who is allowed to compete with their security software.
I think it works better (please allow me to change it) if Microsoft is the hotel. Crowdstrike is the restaurant inside the hotel. The restaurant is serving poisoned food to the guests, who assume it is a decent restaurant because it is in their hotel.
Also the restaurant has their own entrance without security and questionable people are entering regularly, and they are sneaking into the hotel rooms and stealing some items, breaking the elevator.
At the same time, the hotel is in a litigation process with the restaurants association, because in the past they did not allow any restaurant on their premises. The guests, naturally, do not care about this, since their valuables have been stolen, and they have food poisoning. The reputation of the hotel is tarnished.
I don't think this works since Microsoft isn't the hotel. The hotel in your example chooses which restaurants are inside, but Microsoft doesn't. In this example, Microsoft is the builder who built the hotel building for a 3rd party. That 3rd party decides which restaurants it wants to partner with, as well as any other rules about what goes on in the building.
If the builder came around and made changes to ban the 3rd party's restaurant partner, that would cause a ton of issues and maybe get the builder sued.
Microsoft can't decide what can and can't run on their platform - the most they can do is offer certification which can't catch everything, as we just saw with Crowdstrike since they decided to take a shortcut with how they ship updates. Microsoft also had to allow for equal API access so they don't get sued by the EU.
Operating system (hotel) decides which programs run in kernel mode (Crowdstrike) but ok. Let me address the other point.
Again the reasoning of allowing equal API access to avoid getting sued is a false dichotomy: Microsoft could choose to make an OS that would not need such mechanisms to be simply usable.
They could also remove their own crowdstrike-alike offering, so that it would not be considered anti-competitive. They could also choose not to operate in EU. Of course, that would lower their profits, which is the real motive here.
Once you sum it up the reasoning goes: hospitals/flights can stop working because a company cannot lower its profits, and said company is not to blame at all. It is clearly false, the rest is sophism, and back-bending arguments IMO.
I am conceding that point (the "but ok" part). Maybe I could have expressed it better.
Please note, that in my analogy the hotel has input in which restaurant is allowed (opposite of your scenario). There are also not infinite Crowdstrike-like offerings, only a few. Same thing applies to the hotel, yes, only limited by the surface of the building and cultural norms.
I any case, the analogy cannot please everyone, and I can see how there are some errors with it in some aspects. In others, I consider it accurate. Using an analogy is an invitation to nitpick on it, so it is my fault really, but I could not resist.
There are other points in the analogy that I feel reflect very well how ridiculous it is to claim Microsoft has no responsibility whatsoever. IMO they do have at least partial responsibility. One cannot simply excuse them "because EU".
But this implies that even the guests who never went to that restaurant and have no links whatsoever to it might somehow still be directly suffering because of its presence.
In reality this doesn’t seem to be the case at all.
I'm expecting restaurant owners to fire bad valets.
Or in Microsoft's case, via regulatory, social, or software, prevent Crowdstrike from causing harm to their customers.
I'm aware it's a sticky regulatory situation, but CS has a history of these failings and the potential damage could be severe. Despite this, no effort (that I am aware of) was made by Microsoft to inform customers that Crowdstrike introduced potential risks, nor to inform regulators, nor to remove the APIs CS depends on.
I don't believe Microsoft is solely responsible, but I do believe that throwing all of the blame for the very real harm that was caused onto CS alone is missing a piece of the puzzle.
Last aside, every large corp has team(s) focused on risk. There's approximately zero chance they didn't discuss CS at some point. The only way this would not have happened is negligence.
If a Caesars Entertainment property in Macao has enough incidents, should GM update the firmware on their automobiles to force-eject valets at Caesars Entertainment properties in Las Vegas?
Now imagine that GM actually operates valet services in Macao and Las Vegas. Should they be allowed to force-eject valets from competing services?
I am not a Microsoft apologist. I think they should do better. I think Linux and FreeBSD should do better. I personally avoid Microsoft products. But I place more blame on people who use MS products than I do on MS. After all, I never intend to hand my beat up old Corolla over to a valet so why should I have to pay for a "valet mode" feature that Toyota is forced to build into all their cars? Isn't it reasonable that motorcycles, 18-passenger vans, and scooters don't need "valet mode"?
In my book, the auto manufacturer is lower on the list of culprits than the valet, "the establishment that keeps a valet with an abominable record on staff", and the vehicle owner. But some place like Car and Driver could definitely prioritize encouraging GM or Toyota to develop valet modes over berating owners; so I don't mind a place like HN shooting a few arrows at MS. Unless the general public follows their lead and lets bad guys off the hook by shifting too much focus to somebody lower on the list.