Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian: Evaluations on Microsoft and Apple

Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian’s Assessments on Microsoft and Apple

In an interview with CNBC, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian stated that the CrowdStrike update led to significant disruptions in companies using Microsoft computers, posing the question, “When was the last time you heard of a major outage on Apple?” Following the outage that occurred on July 19, Delta had to deal with tough processes such as canceling over 5,000 flights that weekend, compensating affected customers, and “physically intervening to reset” more than 40,000 servers affected by the issue.

Bastian emphasized that while major tech companies are building a future on generative artificial intelligence, they should not forget to improve existing technologies, describing the partnership with Microsoft as “probably the most fragile platform.” While Delta’s CEO praised Apple, it is also worth noting the significant and fundamental difference between Microsoft and Apple.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, a Microsoft spokesperson stated, “It cannot legally wall off its operating system like Apple does due to an insufficient statement reached with the European Commission following a complaint.” This complaint was related to Microsoft limiting core access to third-party developers. It was mentioned that the Redmond-based tech giant should grant access to third-party developers, whereas Apple exhibits a completely opposite approach by restricting third-party developers’ access to the macOS kernel.

However, Apple is also facing its own outages. While the outages on Apple’s side may not cause such a significant impact, especially when looking at the market share distribution in the corporate sector, it can be easily said that it is quite unreasonable to compare Microsoft’s corporate usage with Apple based on clear figures.