Once again, I'm witnessing an all-in, total obsession of all things Microsoft. I'm far removed from the front lines, on an extended summer vacation, so I do pretend to understand everything that's going on. But the current rhetoric harkens back to the days of our first EFB. For those that didn't have the "fun" of experiencing the gem that was the M.S. Surface tablet, Delta was bound and determined to make the thing work, while the rest of the universe enjoyed worry-free ops with a proven competitor. How many iterations did we go through, perhaps three? "2.1 will be awesome, bugs and freezing will be solved, etc., etc." The screen was great for the day, but glitches and poor performance were the baseline for a normal day. I once saw three out of four flame-out on a long range flight. Complaints were less than one might assume, just because we were all so grateful to shed the requirement of paper revisions and/or several commuting pilots’ worth of load capacity (Jepp ship sets). In the end, there was never any back-peddling or explanation of how the Surface became less-than-awesome. We simply got iPads.

I have yet to see any Delta-attributed statements casting aspersions on M.S. for our current IT woes, but we are hitting Crowdstrike pretty hard. Today's internal headline features their name in large font.

I'm not tech-savy in the least, but I bought into Steve Jobs famous quote: "it just works." I simply don't understand the concept of waxing and polishing a turd. I'm not suggesting that Cupertino offers an overall solution to our widespread reliance an entity that isn't taking us to the forefront of IT functionality, but aren't other avenues worth looking down?

 

Microsoft was forced by EU regulators to allow third party vendors access to their kernel, as to prevent Microsoft's perceived monopoly on security software (i.e. Windows Defender). They're currently doing the same thing to Apple. So really, Microsoft doesn't have a dog in the fight. They can't legally fix kernel mods, all in the name of governmental legislation designed to promote "competition" and "consumer choice."

Does they still share in the blame? Most certainly. But it's a bit more nuanced than just "how could Microsoft do this to us?"

 

Sir, this is a Wendy’s…

 

because corporations are all business. They don’t waste time and energy throwing each other under the bus. They leave that to the pilots.

 

I see your point. Thanks for explaining something I had no clue about.

 

If I remember right, Jeppessen forced the ipads. I believe they said they wouldn’t support anything but Ipads because they only had one client using anything else.

 

Jepp's IT is worse than ours. Flight Deck Pro is a heaping pile of burning garbage.

 

That is because it was to sunset and be replaced by ForeFlight for the front end and Jeppesen data for the back end. But airlines said “no we don’t want that GA stuff.”

 

We used Lido at my last job. Charts were clear, properly colored, easy to read, and human factor-centric. Jeppesen could take a page out of their playbook.

 

I used LIDO. They were certainly different, and in ways better But could certainly take a lesson from Jepp as well. Both formats could use updating since they were and are still based on a paper format.