Microsoft bans employees from using Slack, discourages AWS and Google Docs | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft bans employees from using Slack, discourages AWS and Google Docs

gizmodo.com

62 pointsmromanuk35 comments

This is a weird non-article to me. It sounds more just like a CISO policy with SDLC components to provide reasonable guidelines to use the systems they already use and support. If you had a company hosting all of your source code on a private GitLab and you then found out a bunch of people were using the public GitLab, you would be annoyed.

You have to set some guidelines about what people use in very large organizations.

Also, I think it makes sense for Microsoft (or another company) to use their own products (such as their Teams service as a replacement to Slack). Best way for the company to know what their customers experience.

That depends, I think. If your own product isn't as good as the competition to the point that your employees prefer using the competitor's product, you might not want to react to that by banning it, but by looking what they do better and improving your product.

The reason given in the article is solid, though. "Don't share confidential info on systems we don't have control over/trust in, especially if they are controlled by a direct competitor".

Presumably, banning your competitors’ apps will provide greater incentive to make your own apps better. Not having any knowledge of your competitors apps is the problem, not the banning part.

I dogfooded[0] once and don’t remember any channels or mechanisms for our feedback. (Of course the devs would see crash reports.) And no one admitted that we were even eating the dog food.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

> And no one admitted that we were even eating the dog food.

Do you know why? That seems to be a weird thing to refuse to admit.

It was presented as saving license costs by not using the standard product.

I worked for Microsoft nearly 20 years ago. They were understandably real big on using the latest and greatest of their own products. This lead to some weird problems with the corporate infrastructure as it was always on the bleeding edge.

But this is Microsoft, so it's a marginally juicier story because it brings in comments about the stack ranking bureaucratic hell that was MS in the 2000s. Bashing MS is a nice walk down memory lane for some.

> along with tools such as the Grammarly grammar checker

That one makes a lot of sense, it's basically a keylogger in your browser, that's also a recommendation I've made a lot. If you need to use their service, use their web-version on their website, and paste in the text you want to check.

I see ads for this all the time, and it's absurd to me that it's primarily marketed towards native speakers of English. All the ads have college students writing essays. If you're in college and you can't conjugate properly, I don't even know what to say.

That's an incredibly judgemental attitude. Being in college doesn't mean you have to be able to write to perfection.

Most people write terribly when they're freshmen, including me. A big part of the college experience is learning how to write well and write persuasively. You get better by doing it repeatedly and having an instructor provide feedback, even it means getting a few Cs and B-minuses along the way. That's how human beings learn.

Can the submission title be fixed to make more sense within the allowed character count?

The article title is "Microsoft Bans Employees From Using Slack, Has AWS and Google Docs on a 'Discouraged' List"

Suggestion: "Microsoft Bans Employees From Using Slack, Discourages AWS & Google Docs"

This title is wrong, they ban the non-enterprise version of Slack and encouorage the use of Teams over the enterprise version. The real change that should happen is changing the link from the Gizmodo article to the Geekwire article it links to that actually contains this information.

True but you can only fit so much info in the title. How would you suggest the post, even the geekwire post, be titled on HN?

Even an ellipsis at the end of the current title would make much more sense.

"Microsoft Discourages Employees From Using Slack, AWS & Google Docs" is shorter and seems more accurate because of Slack not actually being banned. The actual bans all appear to be for legitimate compliance reasons rather than "don't use competitors", even Github is banned “for Highly Confidential types of information, specs or code” though they presumably have an on-premise instance of Github they use for that.

This sounds extremely clickbaity. Of course MS will discourage its own employees to use a cloud other than its own (which makes up a huge portion of its total business). The 'prohibited' section just sounds like sane steps for any business to take; copy pasting business secrets into a blackbox translation service hoping they don't save what was pasted seems like a pretty big security risk.

This is SOP at most Big 4. It does strike me as funny, though, that MS would ban Slack/GDocs, that Google bans basically all non-Google cloud products, yet both companies are trying to convince other large firms that cloud is the future, on prem is dead, and that their data is safe with them. Seems hypocritical.

"Do as we say, not as we do."

This was discussed previously on HN[0] before being subsequently flagged down for being rather misleading even after a title change to mention that it is "Free" Slack that is being banned.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250426

A bit clickbait. MS bans and/or discourages, where appropriate based on what's employees are working on, using tools that do not meet security policies, like crazy browser plugins that literally snoop everything you type.

Slow news day, I guess?

Microsoft bans the non enterprise version of Slack because of compliance reasons.

I work for a big company (also technology, but not same area as MS), and we also ban slack for the same reasons.

That makes sense. However, I've noticed that some free products are more tolerated than others, like Trello. I wonder why that is - one can suck out data from Trello cards just as well.

Seems perfectly reasonable for Microsoft of all companies to be on the Enterprise version.

They ban certain versions of Slack that are not secure enough, they allow the enterprise version (though like most companies building competing products, it's discouraged over their own software.

Why MS prohibits the use of Grammarly?

Because it will have access to confidential information. It's essentially a keylogger.

I agree, totally forgot about this.

Even GitHub is on the list, which makes me think it's an outdated document maybe?

Github is only on there for sensitive content - which makes total sense.

Basically this article can be summarised as:

> large organisations have company policies about which tools you can use to protect their IP from being leaked

Microsoft isn't alone in that department either. Lots of businesses do the same. It's just a natural part of compliance for any large organisation.

I'd be very surprised if microsoft doesnt acquire slack in the next 2 years

The CEO Stewart Butterfield has already said he doesn't intend to sell, based on his bad experience of selling Flickr to Yahoo.

Going back to the old days when then only smartphone you could use as an MSFT employee was Windows CE based I see.

Granted it lasted for only a few years but it annoyed a lot of people.

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