You needn't look any farther than Hotmail to grow wary of the merits of their new service.
And there's the whole Skype brouhaha.
Microsoft have an edge over Google in that they aren't perceived to be as morally bankrupt, when it comes to privacy and protecting their users (because they earn their money elsewhere), but with the Skype criticism, that may be subject to change. It's a nice flank of attack to use against Google, though, and the video ad in the submission hits all the right notes.
Suppose we move 20 years forward. Are we going to see this type of comment regardless of what the company would be at that time? "No way, man! I bet you're younger than 50, if you... " Do you really think that ghosts from the past need to haunt people's minds for that long regardless of how the state of the world has changed?
I perceive none of MS and Google as being protective of their users or respectful of said users privacy. Nonetheless, when we speak of events that have anything to do with morals, I guess we have to take into consideration the time that has passed since those events have happened, since both the morals and the scene could have changed dramatically.
The UEFI "secure boot" thing tells me they haven't changed one bit. They are still the same company. Trust them at your own risk. You have been warned.
I think your reasoning is flawed, to be honest. If a person (and let's pretend companies are people, just for now) does something amoral, it would take a lot of deliberate effort to rebuild trust in said person. Especially so if the deeds were done in a situation where the person was in power and that power has since dwindled. Of course, companies aren't people, but even then - The actual people who lead the company are, and those are the same people now as then. For comparison, I think mr. Gates has actually done his part to "repay" his debt to the world, but that's him personally - not something that reflects back on Microsoft.
In any case, the topic wasn't about which is fair or not, but rather about what the public image of Google vs. Microsoft is and I strongly disagree with your sentiment that Google generally appear more corrupt than Microsoft does. At least if we're talking the tech-savvy part of this worlds population.
I certainly perceive Microsoft to be morally bankrupt. Google less so, for two reasons:
1. They haven't been around as long and so haven't had to decide how far they'll go when the next big thing comes along.
2. I think they "get" trust, and realise their entire business depends on it. Facebook... not so much. Their continued retraction of new services show that trust isn't even an afterthought.
This is a terribly odd statement. Microsoft has shown, time and time again, that they can shaft their customers because many of them have, or at least had, few alternatives. Google might make a lot of its money on advertising, but it wouldn't make a penny if it didn't have the trust and respect of its customers.
I use Google pretty much entirely because I trust and respect them. GMail is the first and only web email service I have ever used...I've always run my own mail servers, because the trust wasn't there.
I'm not sure I have that level of trust for Microsoft, though my trust in Microsoft is much higher than, say, facebook (which I actively distrust, and try very hard to prevent from having access to anything I would consider private, especially email).
Trust is far and away my highest priority when deciding on online services, and if it isn't yours... well good luck friend, you're going to need it.
Your email is likely to be an important part of your life's documentation, containing an awful lot of very personal information. An unscrupulous provider could use it in all sorts of horrible ways - off the top of my head, how about a lucrative employment screening service that lists of how often you've mentioned getting wasted the night before, or throwing a sickie, or dissed a colleague... let alone the value of strategy, customer communications and other immensely valuable commercial conversations.
This is why many here refuse to use email services they don't control. I myself use Gmail, because I trust Google. Not because they say "Don't be evil", but because I think they understand how their entire business depends on trust. Compare this to Facebook, for whom privacy seems to be an afterthought. Their business is being badly hurt because they continue to trample over their user's trust.
And what about Microsoft? For me, the rorts Microsoft have carried out in the past twenty years (cynically stacking standards organisations with their minions to bulldoze their document format through was the last straw for me) counts them out. I'll never use another MS operating system or online service, end of story. No matter how much better than the competition.
So for me, particularly for online services, trust trumps functionality - absolutely.
You trust Google with your email more than Microsoft? Google is the one that scans your email for advertising keywords.
But no, I was talking about search. Google doesn't do email well in general. Their one significant advance was popularizing threaded display of conversations, and that hasn't been a gmail-exclusive feature for years.
And conversely so with Microsoft employees and similar criticisms. Nobody likes to the think they work for The Man or some kind of corporate tyrant, most truly believe they bringing value to the lives of their users as opposed to exploiting them (even incidentally).
Google is just as susceptible to trust issues as Microsoft or anyone else. Every time Google is caught violating privacy it's always an "accident", like with the wifi network data collection being done by their street view cars. If a company is constantly apologizing for "accidents" that align with their business interests I'd have a hard time trusting them, even if I continue to use them.
I'm tired of people making insinuations about some sinister motive behind the WiFi logging without evidence. How did that debacle "align with Google's business interests"?
What use is there for fragments of WiFi payload data logged from a moving vehicle that also happens to be hopping WiFi frequencies? If there was any intent to exploit it, wouldn't you try to log more comprehensively? That is, by grabbing full HTTP transactions, or whatever.
Of course, this isn't meant to minimize the very clear fact that someone there fucked up. That case appears to be one where the accident label is justified.
How did that debacle "align with Google's business interests"?
Payload data can be used to inform their advertising efforts.
Two other points:
1. After an engineer alerted his supervisor of the "accident" it continued anyway so even if it was a sincere accident, nobody gave a enough of shit to rectify it.
2. Google still has the data two years after they were supposed to have deleted it, which they blame on communication issues as to how to delete it. Is Google saying the don't having the engineering know how to properly dispose of data if needed.
Payload data can be used to inform their advertising efforts.
The data collected while a streetview car drove by can inform their advertising efforts? You really have to bear a serious anti-Google grudge to entertain such a ridiculous, technologically laughable premise.
You don't think the contents of email messages could be used to inform advertising data? Even in aggregate? Do ads in gmail show up at random?
I don't have a grudge against google, I like my android phone over an iPhone and use google Reader and Chrome because they are the best at what they do, and use google analytics because it's good enough for the price. I just don't have any illusions as to what they expect in return for their free products.
Email, of course, contains tons of personal information. If linked to a user's identity, it could clearly be used to inform advertising. However, emails in aggregate probably don't give you any more useful advertising insight than the Web corpus itself, which Google could obviously use if it wanted.
Further, why would Google need to log random bits of WiFi payload data to extract a relatively small amount of email when they operate Gmail?! If the decision to purposefully violate people's privacy had actually been made, wouldn't it be easier to look at Gmail than to use Street View?
There would be more data, better data, and you'd have it more quickly than if you sent a bunch of cars to drive all over the world, collect a bunch of extraneous crap, then wait for them to come back, and screen it for something useful.
And there's the whole Skype brouhaha.
Microsoft have an edge over Google in that they aren't perceived to be as morally bankrupt, when it comes to privacy and protecting their users (because they earn their money elsewhere), but with the Skype criticism, that may be subject to change. It's a nice flank of attack to use against Google, though, and the video ad in the submission hits all the right notes.