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Comment by xemdetia | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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