Dear Reader,
Please accept my apologies for skipping two newsletters. On top of a high workload, my wife and I bought a plot for our new home in St. Gallen. No, it is not the posh one in Switzerland, but the serene one in Austria. It lies in the Gesäuse National Park, a scenic and quiet part of the Eastern Alps. Dozens of mountain hikes will start at our new home. For the last two months, we have been busy designing our house and garden. The big move will be in summer or autumn 2025.
Although I could use our two-year search for a plot as a good example for applying agile principles, I’ll make a hard cut here and move to the top tech and businesses story of the last month: the Crowdstrike update disaster. Crowdstrike, its customers and Microsoft behaved like dilettantes.
- CrowdStrike didn’t test configurations.
- CrowdStrike rolled out an untested update to all computers at once.
- Microsoft allows updates in kernel mode - without having an automatic fallback.
- Customers like Delta Airlines run mission-critical systems without (enough) contingency systems.
At least, these companies gave us a master lesson in how not to do OTA updates.
Enjoy reading,
Burkhard