Microsoft Attempting to Destroy the Careers of Its Critics

This article veers into conspiracist territory as it goes on, with the idea that Microsoft is engaged in some grand, secret scheme to infiltrate open source and destroy it from the inside.

Microsoft will always have its share of bad actors, make mistakes, and act in unpleasant ways. Any large company or institution will do. The question is whether these occasions represent standard operating procedure or just the statistical expected baseline quantity of misbehaviour.

There's no doubt that, in the past, Microsoft had a culture that allowed and encouraged bad behaviour at an individual, tactical and strategic level. I'm not convinced that is the case anymore. However, the aforementioned baseline misbehaviour means you will always be able to cherry-pick a collection of individuals and incidents to support a pre-ordained narrative of evilness, if that fits your worldview.

Years ago, a Microsoft sales associate called my CEO to try to get a member of my team (and probably me) fired because we told Microsoft we were taking a pass on upgrading our company to Vista; too many problems. Similar things have happened to other people in my network. Not saying this is MS policy or anything, but it happens.

I work in the public sector and we’ve been in bed with Microsoft for decades. Happy to have been too, I personally think we should do more Open Source for transparency reasons, but the truth is that Microsoft is the best major tech partner that we have. They may be the only major tech partner that we have that actually understands non-tech high-regulatory enterprise in fact, though Amazon is getting there with AWS. As an example of what I mean by that is major incident. We like to be able to call people, we’re like that in the public sector, and with Microsoft Seattle will quite literally be on the phone with us until our issue is fixed, with a lot of other tech companies you either talk to a chatbot, fill out some form or make a ticket in their support system. When the bureaucracy makes stuff like NSIS (EU security standard) they are always first to implement it. On the development front we’ve seen nothing but improvements over the years, and the fact that they’ve adopted the non-Microsoft techs we use like Node.JS and Python to be first class citizens is amazing. So is the fact that we can now buy C# code instead of JAVA and still run it on Linux servers. So I have a lot of praise for Microsoft.

I don’t see any sort of change in their culture though. Sure they’ve adopted Open Source, and that’s amazing, but they’ve done it because it was the best way to keep enterprise on Microsoft products, even on the development front because Office365 has no real competition.

.Net Core is a good example, it works everywhere but if you’re not using it with Visual Studio for Windows and the Azure devops stack you’ll just not be on equal footing to those who do. There was an issue with the .Net Core 2.1 watch command where it would require a full systems restart on Macs for more than a month, I mean, that’s just not taking Mac using developers seriously. Visual Studio Code has quickly become everyone’s favourite editor, but you know how you get the most out of it? By setting it up with WSL. Of course none of this is an issue of you buy into the Microsoft environment. I mentioned Node.JS, well a lot of the Azure DevOps works with Node as well, and it’s just a natural thing to do when your C# stack is already living there. Of course the flip side of this is that you can never really leave.

I think Microsoft continues to improve, but they haven’t changed a bit.

Always and everywhere, surveillance is ultimately about extortion.

Your phone's nav track is remarkably cheap to obtain from a variety of sources. So is your spouse's, and your siblings', children's, parents', business partners', lawyer's, boss's, boss's family. Dirt on any of them can be used against you. Sometimes, dirt on a judge the judge's family serves as well.

Whenever you see an incomprehensible public action, such as a Senator suddenly resigning, or a billionaire let off from a child-molestation charge, know that behind-the-scenes activity, likely involving extortion, likely based on dragnet surveillance, is involved.

Prosecutors use it to get guilty pleas to charges they could not get a conviction on. Cops and spooks use it to recruit a network of informants.

The only protection any of us have is actual privacy, for ourselves and everyone around us, which requires shutting down pervasive surveillance systems.

Microsoft is very far from alone in employing this sort of dirty trick. They differ mainly in how open they are about it. Evidently they don't feel much risk of it biting them back.

Different organizations differ in how much they use dirty tricks. It depends overwhelmingly on what the top dog at each thinks of it. People will always blame an overambitious underling, but underlings can't do it without at least tacit approval from above.

Doesn't this article quote a case from 2010? Then goes non sequitur to what happens in 2019?

Where are the facts in this piece?