Re: more on broken schools

D <nospam@example.net> writes:

On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

The challenge is inertia and trust. There are a lot of schools who run
azure, are unhappy, and refuse to change because the alterantive is
not azure. So they end up paying 10x or more, because they do not
trust small business. It is very sad. =(

>
That made me think your service is just a cloud-like service---storage,
office-like web applications, mail, calendar, video conference et
cetera.  Are there teachers involved?

>
No, just virtual machines. Too much trouble and too little profit in delivering
office 365 equivalents, calendar and email. We could if we wanted to, but that
would probably require an entire school shifting from Microsoft to us, and I
doubt it will happen. It also probably would mean that we would need to hire
another person to spread the admin and support load, and that would probably not
make it worth it. I'm not ruling it out, but I'm not actively selling it either.

[...]

That's interesting.  But tell me about the teachers because I didn't get
the whole thing yet.  I would think a service like that would require a
24-7 support as the most challenging part.

>
No, the lab environment has no SLA:s, since it is just a lab environment, so if
it goes down for 15 minutes the students just shrug their shoulders and try
again later. But, to be honest, there is very little downtime, and we also have
3 regions/servers. So in case of downtime, first fix is to shift a
student to another
region/server. That usually solves the problem 9 out of 10 times. If that
doesn't work, reboot the 3 servers and wait for 5-10 minutes. If that doesn't
work, reinstall the enviroment which might take 20-40 minutes.

Oh, I see; now I got a better view of the business.  Congrats---I think
that's a pretty nice job.  I would like to have a job like that.