Comment by Spooky23
3 days ago
They never changed. For some reason Satya became CEO and nerds fawned over the “new Microsoft” for whatever reason.
They are a hard nosed company focused with precision on dominance for themselves.
3 days ago
They never changed. For some reason Satya became CEO and nerds fawned over the “new Microsoft” for whatever reason.
They are a hard nosed company focused with precision on dominance for themselves.
Insider here, in m365 though not onedrive. It did change, but not because of satya ; because of rules and legislation and bad press. Privacy and security are taken very seriously (at least by people who care to follow internal rules) not because "we're nice", but because
- EU governments keep auditing us, so we gotta stay on our toes, do things by the book, and be auditable - it's bad press when we get caught doing garbage like that. And bad press is bad for business
In my org, doing anything with customer's data that isn't directly bringing them value is theoretically not possible. You can't deliver anything that isn't approved by privacy.
Don't forget that this is a very big company. It's composed of people who actually care and want to do the right thing, people who don't really care and just want to ship and would rather not be impeded by compliance processes, and people who are actually trying to bypass these processes because they'd sell your soul for a couple bucks if they could. For the little people like me, the official stance is that we should care about privacy very much.
Our respect for privacy was one of the main reasons I'm still there. There has been a good period of time where the actual sentiment was "we're the good guys", especially when comparing to google and Facebook. A solid portion of that was that our revenue was driven by subscriptions rather than ads. I guess the appeal to take customer's money and exploit their data is too big. The kind of shit that will get me to leave.
> Our respect for privacy was one of the main reasons I'm still there. There has been a good period of time where the actual sentiment was "we're the good guys", especially when comparing to google and Facebook. A solid portion of that was that our revenue was driven by subscriptions rather than ads.
How long has MS been putting ads in the start menu?
I have a suspicion that Satya Nadella himself doesn't use Windows 11, otherwise he would have fired the team that messed up the Start Menu and he would have banned all ads from start menu and desktop.
Even Bill Gates dumped the Windows Phone and switched to Android (he prefers the Samsung Galaxy Fold4)
https://www.gearbrain.com/bill-gates-windows-phone-android-2...
As he said, very heterogeneous company.
1 reply →
10 years
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393812
Thanks for the perspective and I both appreciate and agree with you as a customer and observer of those big core services in the enterprise space.
The edges and frontiers are what bug me. AI mania is a pox.
> EU governments keep auditing us, so we gotta stay on our toes, do things by the book
Erm, dude ....
IANAL, and I am sure most people do not need to be lawyers to figure out that not allowing people to permanently opt-out of photo scanning is almost certainly going to be in contravention of every EU law in the book.
I hope the EU take Microsoft to the cleaners over this one.
That's my point. I wish the company would only be composed of people who not only do things by the book, but also do the right thing. This kind of borderline (or across the border) garbage renders nil everyone else's efforts to be exemplary, poison the well of some sort. I'm not sure why they force you to scan photos, if I assume best intentions hopefully that's just that they really want you to use the feature ; but having met product managers with actual nefarious intents who wanted to find ways of circumventing the rules, there's a chance that it's a problem.
I understand that the company doesn't get the benefit of the doubt in such situations, especially when publicists "choose not to answer" why this feature is done like that. Great job there...
I'm also hoping we get a correction, be it the EU or just PR backlash. As I said, this is the kind of shit that makes me not want to have my name associated with the company.
> Privacy and security are taken very seriously
Any company that has to state that they take privacy very seriously, doesn't.
The rest of your response makes that very clear: you are focused on doing things by the book, i.e. the bare minimum required by law instead of actually giving one shit about privacy and security yourself.
Do we even think that was real? I think social media has been astroturfed for a long time now. If enough people make those claims, it starts to feel true even without evidence to support it.
Did they ever open source anything that really make you think "wow"? The best I could see was them "embracing" Linux, but embrace, extend, extinguish was always a core part of their strategy.