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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

Keeping in mind, of course, that Ballmer's Microsoft is very, very different from Nadella's Microsoft...

Keeping in mind, of course, that it's an opinion, and not a fact. I happen to have the opposite opinion, although I documented it a lot more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225290

History does not help with trusting them.

So let's wait and see.

But I talked about MS PR team before, and I can already see it at work everywhere. Here, the first HN links were not warmly welcomed, so we had another one published, then another one published, until one with a positive top comment for them is here.

Also plenty of comments to defend them by using vague positive things like "they did good things recently" or "they like open source".

If you go on reddit you'll see the same is happening.

The good thing is that it means now they care a lot about what we think of them. They didn't before. So at least, if they haven't changed, they are forced to act like they have.

MS PR astroturfing HN is one potential cause.

Another possibility is that HN members are responding favorably to MS's recent moves.

Be careful not to dismiss anything that runs counter to your own narrative as fake. Like you said, we'll see!

It doesn't have to be astroturfing. Repeatedly exposing HN readers to the same news would be a good way to gradually increase positive opinion until a desirable threshold is reached ("the first positive top comment").

You'll have to walk me through your logic on that again.

How is repeated exposure more likely to increase positive opinion?

It is more likely to be perceived as a common opinion and then people tend to go with what they think the crowd thinks.

(PDF) http://erewhon.superkuh.com/library/Neuroscience/Psychology/...

That would work through repeatedly exposing people to positive or favorable news. Aka astroturfing. Aka what I asked about.

Parent comment specified the same news, which makes less sense.

If I hear 100x that MS is buying GitHub, that doesn't make me more likely to respond favorably.

Suppose it isn't more likely, that it is just random. All Microsoft has to do is pick the one article that has a positive opinion at the top and promote that one.

That's astroturfing. Which is what my original comment was about.

That's one of the basic premises of advertising!

I had this debate for the last 10 years, and everytime there are persons to say "maybe this time they changed", and everytime use something like "Be careful not to dismiss anything that runs counter to your own narrative as fake".

The problem with a PR machine is that it never get tired of repeating the same story, while we do. And people eventually listen to the PR machine anyway. That's why it works. Not because it's clever, but because of human nature.

It works with politician, CEO, singers...

But yeah, we'll see.

I've been watching MS for the last 23 years. So I'm not oblivious to history. ;)

And granted that's how PR works, but the problem with carrying distrust to defend against it is that is eventually makes one paranoid.

Personally, I aspire to objective reevaluation at the current point in time.

In 2018?

Microsoft historically did terrible things to open source, Balmer was an asshole about casting it as us vs them, and they still have substantial legacy OS and Office revenue streams to protect.

At the same time, their cloud business is rapidly growing, they've realized the only way to compete there is to embrace open source, and that's beginning to permeate the rest of the company. Largely via promoting someone from the dev / server / cloud business as CEO.

I won't ever really forgive MicroSoft until they give us back "Clippy".

In a marketing atmosphere dominated by Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Watson.... how can MicroSoft continue to ignore the original and much beloved assistant A.I?

You’ll see the same thing with Google. I’ve found quite a few Google shills on here

Well yes, they all have huge com departments with people creating accounts and maintaining it for years to get organic reputations.

We stopped trusting TV and starting trusting each other more. So they started disguising as us. It's the natural evolution.

Agree, hard to distinguish people from ads these days

There are a lot of 'useful idiots' too---people doing it for free without any direction.

> The good thing is that it means now they care a lot about what we think of them. They didn't before. So at least, if they haven't changed, they are forced to act like they have.

What’s the difference, really?

One won't stay the same if the wind change directions.

It might be more accurate to say it's a hypothesis rather than an opinion.

If it would legitimize my claim that Microsoft is different under Nadella, I can write a blog post about it with supporting data.

I had a serious dislike of MS under Ballmer, and every single one of your examples in that post was under his reign. But the argument that "they used to be bad, so they still have to be bad" is just silly. Ballmer may have screamed "developers" on stage, but he was the one who lost them - which cost them dearly (mobile, cloud). Shareholders and the board pushed him out for that reason, so the new management had no choice but to sail a completely different course - which they did. It's no accident that their new CEO is the guy that was heading the Azure division, which is effectively selling Linux.

But yes - it's still a company that will act in it's own self-interest, as any company will, and right now, that aligns pretty well with playing nice with the opensource community. That could change - in the future, so some caution is always a good idea (but that's the same for Google, Apple, Amazon, ...), but today, I have little issues with MS's attitude today towards opensource. Tomorrow, we'll see.

That said - I don't mind them buying github and I like that people are actively looking into alternatives, github is simply too big imho, and too many things just expect git = github, which sucks too.

Did windows 10 stopped shipping ads and spywares ? Or orce update (and sometime locking my PC for 30 minutes then erase my grub for even more fun) ? Did skype turned back great, and P2P again ? Did they revoked their abusive patents ? Did they start to adopt open standard for new products ? Did they quit the Business Software Alliance ?Did they stopped shipping root TLS certificates from dictatures so that they can basically intercept any of my communications ?

Their updated terms of services are a treat:

https://professional-troublemaker.com/2018/03/25/microsoft-b...

If you disable telemetry in Windows, the OS __still__ calls home:

https://social.nah.re/@alex/99699321529592263

MS prompting his users to not think too much about what it's doing :

https://shelter.moe/@fenarinarsa/99472223904930838

Bitlocker sends you private key to microsoft (and questions about it, said they were to be trusted, but you could request deletion individually if you wanted):

https://www.undernews.fr/libertes-neutralite/windows-10-vs-v...

I have sane doubts about this new microsoft.

We got another new microsoft every year. I have this argument every year.

And since I do see they are getting way better at PR, I think that now I just miss worse scandals because they deal with them much better.

Yeah, it had reliable revenue streams....

Can you provide evidence that it is in fact very different in that respect?

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