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Japanese businessmen don't fuck around, and they wait for no one.
Japan keeping fax machines around suddenly looks less like resistance to progress and more like disaster recovery planning. Microsoft spent years selling the future of work, only for a paper tray and a dial tone to become the high availability tier.
Reminder that eicker is an undisclosed AI bot account that advertised AI services in its bio.
Old salaryman in boardroom: “This meeting could have been a fax.”
I'll guess any business grade copy machine can also do fax without much setup. Old protocols don't just vanish. It was only microslop that went down, that shit is just not needed that badly.
📠
Hell yeah, let's go! I want adobe to suffer as well.
They stopped using fax machines?
They're trying to move away from it officially.
Just pretending
I think I've read somewhere today that Germans did the same.
Yes, how we love our fax machines. 🙈😂
In the context of current events, it seems a practical and smart crisis planning step. Especially useful for hospitals and institutions to secure a necessary data flow.
It seems to me far wiser to spread services more widely across several providers. Seriously: how daft is it to buy email, instant messaging, video conferencing from a single provider?
Microsoft builds its ecosystem around vendor lock-in. You're using Entra? M365 integrates real nicely with that. Oh, you want to use something else? Well, good luck with that, our documentation is so piss poor even CoPilot won't be able to help you. And once you drink the M365 kool-aid, now you have Exchange, Outlook, Teams and Office. You also get afflicted with SharePoint as a bonus! Good luck justifying anything else to your management.
Honestly, I don't see how MS hasn't fall afoul of EU anti-trust laws, again. They have bound everything up so tightly that you're lucky installing Windows doesn't obligate you to a lifetime of M365 subscription costs.
Interoperability becomes an issue though. FLOSS and federated systems help there, but we all know the big providers aren't going to play ball. Unless we rebuild the whole stack from the ground up, proprietary systems are always going to try to funnel everyone into vendor lock-in and platform monopolies. This is the end result of choices that were made 30 years ago, based on assumptions that didn't hold up, but none of us now dealing with the consequences, had any say in making.
Yeah, but a physical backup service in critical areas like fax could remain too.
Haven't seen one in ages, not even at doctors' offices.
What's the German word for fax machine?
Faxgerät or just Fax.
That's less funny than I hoped.
Ask what they call a cell phone. Go on. Ask.
A mobile
It’ll either sound like a pastry or a weapon.
You hoped Germans would be funny?! As I've experienced, they love making puns in English, I assume because none are possible in German
Next floppy disks, please.
This isn't adding up to me. Unless you're paying out the ass for an analog line, you need more that just a fax machine and a jack. You either have a VoIP system with fax support, or you've moved to a FoIP service that probably handles everything through email anyway (or both).
Unless you already do a ton of business through your phone system and can justify a robust solution, there's no way you're ready to just turn up some old All-In-Ones and you're just better off eating the cost of this outage and going after Microsoft for whatever your SLA gets you.
"Analog" is expensive as hell today and there's no way it's a justifiable expense outside of extremely remote areas.
Considering the average age of the Japanese population I wouldn't be shocked to find out a somewhat big percentage still use last century methods. Hell, I remember somewhere mentioned the last system with floppies was finally put to rest on the government level (do not recall exactly the story but I think was in Japan)
I miss my fax machine. Wonder what ever happened to it.
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2026
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