Yeah. That generally how you fool people you are a good person. You do stuff that appears to be good hearted. Companies do that too. Just like politicians.
I can't understand why people today lack the ability to see a scam.
I can't understand why people today lack the ability to see a scam.
Doing good things is not a scam.
Maybe he feels guilty for some of his actions as Microsoft CEO, maybe he doesn't. Maybe he's cheating on his wife, or doing some other nefarious deed -- but those charities still have that money, and they're still (probably) doing good work with it.
it’s necessary for the good to precede the bad in a way that demonstrates the good was to prevent the detection or objection to the subsequent bad.
using good deeds to atone for past transgressions is different in a way that is subtle.
Orson Scott Card is a good author.
Orson Scott Card is a bigot, and I do not ever wish to give him any money, so I will not buy his books now that I know of his bigotry.
His bigotry doesn't cancel out his talent as an author, and while I might find that I don't enjoy reading his books any more as a result of what I know of him, that doesn't change what my opinion was before I found out about his bigotry.
A good act is a good act, even if it's surrounded by a dozen bad acts.
so those good deeds aren’t poisoned by the bigotry.
if you found out that he set out to make stellar art for the explicit purpose of softening people to his bigotry, then it would be a smoke screen.
Companies aren't people though; they're made up of people.
So, where you could make the argument that it's very difficult for people to change, the people who make up a large company change everyday.
There are likely many "good" and "bad" people in a given company for any definition of good and bad. I'm sure the people at any sufficiently large company don't even agree on what is good or bad.
Microsoft employees may also believe they are now becoming a nicer company. It would make sense to have that kind of internal communication, and it increases morale and productivity of you believe your work is positive.
Every large company manages public relations. That does not mean that they manage public relations dishonestly.If a company wants to turn their business model around, even if only out of self-interest, that is likely going to be accompanied by a PR effort.
There is no reason to assume malicious intent behind every PR-campaign because no institution benefits from lying out of principle.
And in the case of Microsoft, this turn-around seems reasonable. Their old, proprietary model isn't making them that much money any more. They're trying to be a developer-friendly platform.
While I know that for some people in SV this may come as a shock but not every company is a ploy to use investor's money to pay yourself a fat salary for a year or two before declaring that grubhub for toilet paper is not a sustainable business model, laying off everyone and selling everything you scraped from your users cell phones to whoever will do the most harm with it.
Some companies actually optimize for making a sustainable profit by taking other people's money in exchange for delivering goods and services.
I agree with you except for the section above. I don't know that Microsoft has done anything remarkably "good". Today's Microsoft is centered around their surveillance, keylogging Operating System. It's centered around their deceptive & litigious forced upgrades to Windows 10.
Someone mentioned a piece of software called 'Yammer' (a freemium enterprise social networking service) a few days ago that I'm not familiar with. When I looked into it, I found that Microsoft had acquired Yammer in 2012 for US$1.2 billion.[0]
This is the current result of that acquisition: "The new integrations have implications for the way Microsoft sells Yammer. Microsoft is encouraging customers to migrate to its Office 365 plans. Effectively Microsoft will stop selling Yammer as a standalone service."[1]
I'm sure there are many more modern day examples. I'll have to delve back into Microsoft land to find out (MS refugee for a few years now after jumping ship to the privacy-respecting Linux).
To me, there is little difference between the Microsoft of 20 years ago and the Microsoft today. In many ways, with the addition of user-hostile surveillance and data-hording, Microsoft is far worse than they've ever been.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yammer
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2016/09/26/microsoft-is-killing-yamm...
Nadella's microsoft is not the same as Ballmer's and Gates's microsoft. In Gates' day windows licenses brought in the money, and linux and the web were the dominant threats to microsoft's revenue, completely explaining microsoft's behavior around 2000 that earned them their reputation.
Nadella's microsoft however is a cloud services company, with office 365 and azure bringing in an ever larger slice of the pie, and windows reduced to a single digit percentage of the revenue stream. Cloud services are built on open source. It makes complete financial sense for microsoft to be a strong open source backer now.
Business has parted with ethics a long time ago. Many don't even pay it lip service putting bribes as line items on budgets.
Careful there. There is no consensus that humans do have souls. Personality might have been a better word to pick, since what you are describing better fits the idea of personality, but that is dangerous as well.
But regardless of the specific term we want that separates individuals from companies, there is no denying that companies are more then the sum of the individuals they are made of. Group psyche has been proven to prevail through replacement of every member. Though one should not jump to the opposite conclusion either—that companies’s behavior remains static through a change in leadership.
"Soul" doesn't have to mean "immortal ghost." Humans have souls tautologically; the word is one way of trying to get at something about our experience with ourselves and others. Personality doesn't quite cover it, psyche might be closer, but soul has the depth.
That said, I agree with the premise that human organizations can have a culture that starts to border if not overlap conceptually with "soul."
On net though, Microsoft appears to be doing more things that I like, but if we're being pragmatic, I should like the things I determine to be 'good' whether or not they are also doing things I consider to be 'bad' -- but on the whole, if they're doing things I like just to make me more likely to contribute to their code, or work for them, or be a customer, then they're still doing more things that I like, scam or not.
I'm not thrilled with windows 10 ads, but typescript, chakra js engine, dot net core, and others are open source and being developed in the open on github - and that's pretty cool.
In my opinion Microsoft's open source projects are not a scam to trick people into liking them. They're part of a broad realization that projects run like this will see broader adoption and generally will be higher quality.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/05/microsoft-explains-windo...