At best, this is a tin-plated lining, not a “silver lining” as you described it:

“The silver lining? Office 365’s Lync and SharePoint kept working. But there’s one more thing that seems to get lost amid all the angst: Microsoft kept its customers reasonably well informed. It fessed up.

No, there was no explanation for why the outage happened — even now, we don’t have a backstory — and no estimate of the time to repair. There was no talk about CRM or SkyDrive. But the worst problem, Office 365’s Exchange Online sleeping with the fishes, was reported on the Service Health Page as Incident Ex440.

The Office 365 support 800-number went dead. The Office 365 Service Request link on the Admin page didn’t work. The Office 365 Community Forum went ballistic, with very little response from Microsoft.”

I see zero reason to embrace Office 365 nor any other Cloud computing. You lose control of your data, you may lose access to your data, and any minimum wage flunky in the employ of the “cloud” provider can walk off with your company’s data. In every way it increases the vulnerability of your company to very large security and reliability disasters.

Cloud computing has less than zero value to the company. Any IT guy who embraces it should fear for his job.

The only reasons that I can see for software vendors to push this nonsense as though it had value is… it has value TO THE SOFTWARE VENDORS.

Selling this storage and software-as-a-service has two values TO THE VENDOR (but not to you):
First, software as a service means that they can remove and control access to that software, so they plug the piracy hole.

Second, the cloud vendor gets access to your data. (Remember that gmail reads your mail… and that DropBox.com only recently admitted that their encryption did not protect your data from beign read by DropBox staff.) Even if their only customers are governments and folks buying “aggregate non-personally identifiable data”, that’s still a security leak for you and a source of income to the cloud vendor.

So let’s not get misty when we think about cloud computing. The Cloud is something that should STAY in the realm of “vaporware” because as a real service it’s a disservice.

So, basically, MS fouled up on simple redundancy and customer support…and you’re searching for words of praise? Why are you searching for kind things to say when they’re as rare as needles in this metaphorical haystack of reasons to hate? The main news story here is, “Hay! (sic) MS’s Office 365 fell down hard and showed how poorly MS is supporting its Office 365 customer base.”