Microsoft is serious because the world is full of people with needs who do not know better and Microsoft is still the default to serve those needs.

Something does not have to be useful, benign, consistent, worthwhile, or deserving to exist in order to be serious.

For example: Losing an arm and an eye to a fireworks accident, being grievously assaulted in an alley, or having Microsoft arbitrarily delete all your data, are all very serious things. So, I think it is fair to say Microsoft can still be called serious.

As long as the legal department is very serious, that might work rather well.

Never keep your data and your backups in the same place. That’s true for in-office servers, data-centres and cloud. If you must use cloud, use two different providers for your own services and backups.

Also, have a disaster recovery plan ready, and exercise it regularly.

Yes. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft. But I also am the volunteer IT guy at a nonprofit, and am speaking entirely in that context.

I was quite unhappy to get a mail back in (checks archives) January that our grant would be discontinued and we’d either have to make do with the web versions of things, migrate someplace, or start paying. They also reminded us several more times before the drop date. I don’t really understand why Microsoft chose to discontinue the nonprofit grants, and it put a little egg on my face after I had recommended it to our board — but they definitely notified us of the change and what it would mean.

We’ve opted to pay for now; it’s $3/user/month for the SKU that gets full desktop versions of Office, Teams, etc. so not really breaking the bank compared to all the other things we have to pay for.

> What happened to Khosla was just one instance of a crisis that has rocked small nonprofit owners across the globe, who allege that Microsoft failed to communicate with them in a substantive manner about the license cancellations and left them unable to prepare their organizations for the future. As they’ve related online, these already resource-strapped nonprofits have lost troves of data, are struggling to continue their operations, and have been left unable to make up the technology gaps with alternative services. People who run service orgs with low budgets and benefited for years from Microsoft’s programs no longer have much of the technology they need to keep things going—for either the short or long term.

This quote contains linked sources but I can't see them since they're largely on Reddit and Facebook. The Microsoft ones suggest people were blindsided by this cancellation, and that the official support channels in Microsoft are broken. It seems like everyone who was blindsided also tried to submit an official support ticket and was unable to, which is in line with my experience interacting with Microsoft.

The second paragraph of the email:

We strongly advise transitioning your users to a different Microsoft 365 offer for nonprofits, before the subscription is cancelled, to avoid disruption and data loss. Connect now with your current Microsoft partner – or find a partner – to get started. Learn more about what happens to your data and access when your subscription ends.

That last sentence links to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/commerce/sub...

Nine PBS (PBS member station) lost 50tb/70 years of archives due to cloud provider ending operations abruptly

As a daily Linux user and enthusiast, I detest statements like this. You did not read the article not the problem that those companies have and your only solution is "Use LibreOffice" without any actual interest in what their problem is or what an actual solution to their problems is. People like you push newbies away from Linux.

Using LibreOffice does not give you web sharing, nor permission systems, nor automation workflows, nor easy to use access controls, nor so many other things.