I don't agree. I know Microsoft will move or even outright delete important content because chasing shiny new ideas will get somebody promoted. And so I direct people away from Microsoft solutions because that's going to make my life easier.
Any link to Microsoft documentation that doesn't both go via aka.ms and have a significant user community to ensure the aka.ms link stays correct will decay until it's useless.
So by the time you read this https://aka.ms/trustcertpartners may point at a page which is now styled as a wiki or a blog post or a video, but it will get you the list of CAs trusted by Microsoft's products.
However links from that page (e.g. to previous lists) are internal Microsoft links and so, unsurprisingly, they've completely decayed and are already worthless.
For the US Treasury, just like Congress or the Air Force, I don't have some alternative choice, so it doesn't really matter whether I think they're good or bad at this. But Microsoft is, to some extent at least, actually in a competitive business and I can just direct people elsewhere.
>I don't agree. [...] And so I direct people away from Microsoft solutions
I don't doubt there is a narrower tech audience (e.g. HN) that would base tech stack strategy on which company has the most 404 errors but my comment was specifically responding to the author's use of "generally".
I interpreted "they generally lose confidence in the owner of the server" -- as making a claim about the psychology of the general public non-techie websurfers. TBL had an intuition about that but it didn't happen. Yes, people are extremely annoyed by 404 errors but history has shown that websurfers generally accept it as a fact of life.
In any case, to followup on your perspective, I guess it's possible that somebody avoided C# because the Microsoft website has too many 404 errors and chose Sun Java instead. But there were lots of broken links in sun.java.com as well (before and after Oracle acquisition) so I'm not sure it's a useful metric.
Why can't it be both? They accept it as a fact of life but also lose confidence. I understand why links get broken and accept that it can happen but when it does, I try to stray away from that website. Non-techie websurfers probably don't even understand why the link is broken so they get even more confused. One one hand they might think it's their fault but on the other hand, they might assume the entire website stopped working.
>I know Microsoft will move or even outright delete important content because chasing shiny new ideas will get somebody promoted. And so I direct people away from Microsoft
Do the other providers that you recommend in place of Microsoft have a better record of not changing/removing URIs on their website?
Yes. You might be underestimating just how bad Microsoft are at this.
I was originally going to say that although the links on the Microsoft page currently work they can't be expected to stay working. They had worked when I last needed them after all. But that was at least a year ago and so I followed one, and sure enough meanwhile Microsoft had once again re-organised everything and broke them all ...
Even the link to their current list as XML (on Microsoft's site) from this page is broken, it gives you some XML, as promised, but I happen to know the correct answer and it's not in that XML. Fortunately the page has off-site links to the CCADB and the CCADB can't be torched by somebody in a completely different department who wants to show their boss that they are an innovator so the data in there is correct.
Microsoft provides customer facing updates for this work by the way. The current page about that assures you that updates happen once per month except December, and tell you about January and February's changes. Were there changes in March, April, or May? Actually I know there were, because Rob Stradling (not a Microsoft employee) mirrors crucial changes to a GitHub repository. Are they documented somewhere new that I couldn't find? Maybe.
I don't agree. I know Microsoft will move or even outright delete important content because chasing shiny new ideas will get somebody promoted. And so I direct people away from Microsoft solutions because that's going to make my life easier.
Any link to Microsoft documentation that doesn't both go via aka.ms and have a significant user community to ensure the aka.ms link stays correct will decay until it's useless.
So by the time you read this https://aka.ms/trustcertpartners may point at a page which is now styled as a wiki or a blog post or a video, but it will get you the list of CAs trusted by Microsoft's products.
However links from that page (e.g. to previous lists) are internal Microsoft links and so, unsurprisingly, they've completely decayed and are already worthless.
For the US Treasury, just like Congress or the Air Force, I don't have some alternative choice, so it doesn't really matter whether I think they're good or bad at this. But Microsoft is, to some extent at least, actually in a competitive business and I can just direct people elsewhere.