
Microsoft Attempting to Destroy the Careers of Its Critics - sametmax
http://techrights.org/2019/06/20/microsoft-bullying/
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stupidcar
This article veers into conspiracist territory as it goes on, with the idea
that Microsoft is engaged in some grand, secret scheme to infiltrate open
source and destroy it from the inside.

Microsoft will always have its share of bad actors, make mistakes, and act in
unpleasant ways. _Any_ large company or institution will do. The question is
whether these occasions represent standard operating procedure or just the
statistical expected baseline quantity of misbehaviour.

There's no doubt that, in the past, Microsoft had a culture that allowed and
encouraged bad behaviour at an individual, tactical and strategic level. I'm
not convinced that is the case anymore. However, the aforementioned baseline
misbehaviour means you will always be able to cherry-pick a collection of
individuals and incidents to support a pre-ordained narrative of evilness, if
that fits your worldview.

~~~
williamaadams
I've worked for MS for 20 years. I sat in one of those Steve Ballmer meetings
where he decried OpenSource. But, more soberingly at the time was that he said
"we won't sell on Linux because we simply don't know now", in answer to the
question "when will SQL Server be available on Linux"?

Times have changed. I mean look, we bought GitHub. That's not a move of
someone that's trying to destroy from the inside. If it were, we would have
immediately just slow rolled it, but we're actually making improvements.

I don't think we're collectively smart enough (nor are most orgs) to pull off
grand conspiracies. Just a bunch of humans trying to do what's right for the
company and customers.

So, I agree with your assessment. Lots of good, still bad actors, modern times
have changed.

~~~
sametmax
Yes, times change. Now MS is not the top dog anymore, Amazon, Apple, Google
and Facebook are all eating his lunch. There is competition. So they can't get
away with acting like the old MS. The marketing people figured that out, and
are just adjusting. Business as usual.

I've never seen a deeply flawed self-enclosed cultured turned into a sane one.
I've seen ones change because they were so much injected with outside
influenced. I've seen ones change because the core was alright, and it
recognized the problem. But never have I seen a team of bullies sticking
together and turn into good people.

However, I have seen plenty of them putting up a smile, getting some green
paint on and buying a stairway to heaven.

It's a shame people keep falling for it though. That's why politicians can be
crooked. That's why abusive relationships last. That's why you can pollute,
use children workers and lie to customers: by the time you pay the price, it's
a slap on the wrist compared to what you did, and earned from it.

Then you just say you changed, and people forget or forgive, let you keep the
loot, and the right to carry on with your business.

~~~
wayneftw
> Now MS is not the top dog anymore, Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are
> all eating his lunch.

MS is one of the most valuable companies in the world, and regularly surpasses
Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook as _the most valuable company_ in the
world.

> I've never seen a deeply flawed self-enclosed cultured turned into a sane
> one.

I doubt that your definition of sanity is at all useful here. You're obviously
not familiar with the core teams that comprise MS and you're not disseminating
any information here that is even remotely useful.

I guess you're safe in the bubble here though where people think Windows is
simply unusable because some of the control panel windows have a different
dressing than other ones and that macOS is the best despite that it's missing
the most basic window management features! Hah!!

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
I doubt HN crowd at large cares about control panel settings that much. What's
importan though is that for many years MS led a very violent campaign against
their competition, including Linux and Open Source. It wasn't a one-time
thing. It was year after year, with a strategy and tactics, some of it leaked
in the Halloween Documents. These clearly showed that Microsoft is an
equivalent of self-absorbed bully who doesn't really care about the benefit of
their customers but just net profit. It's really hard to forget. So I'm sorry
if some of us don't believe Nadella's smile.

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Ensorceled
Years ago, a Microsoft sales associate called my CEO to try to get a member of
my team (and probably me) fired because we told Microsoft we were taking a
pass on upgrading our company to Vista; too many problems. Similar things have
happened to other people in my network. Not saying this is MS policy or
anything, but it happens.

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moksly
I work in the public sector and we’ve been in bed with Microsoft for decades.
Happy to have been too, I personally think we should do more Open Source for
transparency reasons, but the truth is that Microsoft is the best major tech
partner that we have. They may be the only major tech partner that we have
that actually understands non-tech high-regulatory enterprise in fact, though
Amazon is getting there with AWS. As an example of what I mean by that is
major incident. We like to be able to call people, we’re like that in the
public sector, and with Microsoft Seattle will quite literally be on the phone
with us until our issue is fixed, with a lot of other tech companies you
either talk to a chatbot, fill out some form or make a ticket in their support
system. When the bureaucracy makes stuff like NSIS (EU security standard) they
are always first to implement it. On the development front we’ve seen nothing
but improvements over the years, and the fact that they’ve adopted the non-
Microsoft techs we use like Node.JS and Python to be first class citizens is
amazing. So is the fact that we can now buy C# code instead of JAVA and still
run it on Linux servers. So I have a lot of praise for Microsoft.

I don’t see any sort of change in their culture though. Sure they’ve adopted
Open Source, and that’s amazing, but they’ve done it because it was the best
way to keep enterprise on Microsoft products, even on the development front
because Office365 has no real competition.

.Net Core is a good example, it works everywhere but if you’re not using it
with Visual Studio for Windows and the Azure devops stack you’ll just not be
on equal footing to those who do. There was an issue with the .Net Core 2.1
watch command where it would require a full systems restart on Macs for more
than a month, I mean, that’s just not taking Mac using developers seriously.
Visual Studio Code has quickly become everyone’s favourite editor, but you
know how you get the most out of it? By setting it up with WSL. Of course none
of this is an issue of you buy into the Microsoft environment. I mentioned
Node.JS, well a lot of the Azure DevOps works with Node as well, and it’s just
a natural thing to do when your C# stack is already living there. Of course
the flip side of this is that you can never really leave.

I think Microsoft continues to improve, but they haven’t changed a bit.

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ncmncm
Always and everywhere, surveillance is ultimately about extortion.

Your phone's nav track is remarkably cheap to obtain from a variety of
sources. So is your spouse's, and your siblings', children's, parents',
business partners', lawyer's, boss's, boss's family. Dirt on any of them can
be used against you. Sometimes, dirt on a judge the judge's family serves as
well.

Whenever you see an incomprehensible public action, such as a Senator suddenly
resigning, or a billionaire let off from a child-molestation charge, know that
behind-the-scenes activity, likely involving extortion, likely based on
dragnet surveillance, is involved.

Prosecutors use it to get guilty pleas to charges they could not get a
conviction on. Cops and spooks use it to recruit a network of informants.

The only protection any of us have is actual privacy, for ourselves _and_
everyone around us, which requires shutting down pervasive surveillance
systems.

Microsoft is very far from alone in employing this sort of dirty trick. They
differ mainly in how open they are about it. Evidently they don't feel much
risk of it biting them back.

Different organizations differ in how much they use dirty tricks. It depends
overwhelmingly on what the top dog at each thinks of it. People will always
blame an overambitious underling, but underlings can't do it without at least
tacit approval from above.

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atemerev
Doesn't this article quote a case from 2010? Then goes non sequitur to what
happens in 2019?

~~~
mcny
My understanding is that while Scott Guthrie & Co is influential today, there
is at least one camp of people that opposes this new openness. There is no
guarantee the "other camp" won't get influential in the future or sabotage
what they can.

Even dot net core is not free and open source yet.

[https://github.com/dotnet/source-
build/blob/release/3.0/Docu...](https://github.com/dotnet/source-
build/blob/release/3.0/Documentation/SourceBuildPrebuiltRepoStatus.md)

Even as they say everything is fine, I imagine they are fending off constant
attacks from within Microsoft.

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danielovichdk
Where are the facts in this piece?

