Back in May, when the Crowdstrike bug happened, people were posting wild takes on Twitter and in my signal groupchats about how Crowdstrike is only used everywhere because the government regulators subject you to copious extra red tape if you try to switch to something else.

Here’s the original claim:

Microsoft blamed a 2009 antitrust agreement with the European Union that they said forced them to sustain low-level kernel access to third-party developers.[286][287][288] The document does not explicitly state that Microsoft has to provide kernel-level access, but says Microsoft must provide access to the same APIs used by its own security products.[287]

This seems consistent with your understanding of regulatory practices (“they do not give a rats ass what particular software vendor you use for anything”), and is consistent with the EU’s antitrust regulations being at fault—or at least Microsoft’s cautious interpretation of the regulations, which indeed is the approach you want to take here.

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Moneyball

The Martian

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RRR

Ex Machina

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