Yesterday I read an article on Ars Technica called “Why the US government’s overreliance on Microsoft is a big problem.” It was one of those things that I read that did not make the cut as I did not think there was anything educational enough in the article to be worth passing along. But one comment in the article about the reliance of Microsoft in effect creating a huge single point of failure stuck with me and made me think long after I could no longer remember what else was in the article.

One of the things that bugs me is when people talk about how to government should do this or do that to prepare for some possible disaster but don’t take responsibility for doing even the smallest things themselves. If people took even small steps towards preparedness it would make them less of a burden in those same disasters and in aggregate be more beneficial most things people want the government to do. So if you think it is stupid for the government to create a massive over reliance on Microsoft what are you doing in your life that makes it so you have alternatives?

On one hand, my reaction to those thoughts is that if Microsoft and its products ever fail in a systematic way I will have much bigger problems then if I have a spare laptop that can run a Linux distro or not. Also, I have limited bandwidth to deal with various contingencies and things like clean water or ways to deal with gas shortages seem higher on the list then the ability to use a computer.

On the other hand, this reaction is tempered by my recent experience with the COVID pandemic. If you had asked me prior to everything kicking off what would be the likely result of a pandemic, I would have talked about supply chain disruptions. This would have been no act of genius on my part. The historical record clearly indicates that those are common problems during serious pandemics and everyone pre-COVID who bothered to think about pandemics had the same concerns. So this was no great genius on my part but the experience of COVID showed that those concerns are well founded (even if in COVID’s case the issues were more caused by mass hysteria then any real impact caused by COVID itself).

But what I would not have predicted is that the single best prep for my extended family would be an investment in increasing the reliability and speed of the internet connection. In fact, if you had asked me prior to COVID if spending money on better internet was a good way to prepare for a pandemic, I would have told you no. I would have said that it was better to spend the money on backup power sources/greater food storage instead. And maybe if the Black Death came again I would have been right.

As it turns out, Black Death has not yet come again. And for our particular family and for the particular insanity that was COVID, investing in better internet was best preparation that could have been done even though it was not done for that reason. I guess the lesson here is that becoming more resilient is not all about preparing for the end of the world. Sometimes it is worth investing in a little redundancy in the things that are important to you just because you never know what kind of curve balls will be thrown at you.

I would not invest a couple of hours to make it so that I had a slim chance to play computer games even if someone hijacked Microsoft’s update system to bring down everyone with a windows computer. But would I invest a few hours to enable myself to still have some word processing and maybe basic spreadsheet abilities simply by creating a way to boot up my laptop on Linux if I wanted to? If the cost for doing so really was that low (as rumor has it) maybe it is something I should move up on my to do list.