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Comment by tozeur | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand the repulsive feelings towards helping the govt. Would we rather have the people in control of the military and our troops use out-of-date tech?

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> Would we rather have the people in control of the military and our troops use out-of-date tech

I don't trust or rely on any infrastructure that largely uses microsoft products...I'm sure there's some minor stuff hidden away here and there within systems. MSFT has a software philosophy, which is reciprocated in their culture, that can only be described as byzantine and unpredictable. They are basically 00's Oracle at this point.

I thought they have reinvented themselves with the new embrace for linux and the cloud? I've always thought Windows OS is garbage but Microsoft seemed fine without it nowadays. Can anyone with Microsoft knowledge share a little bit about the culture and how it's changed?

Microsoft has definitely turned the corner in terms of culture with some projects like Typescript, WSL, .NET Core, etc., but Azure is very much still the "old Microsoft." It was started before this turn and has many of the same old stinks that anyone who's worked in Enterprise Microsoft-land can smell.

They may yet right the ship as time goes on and their growing revenue points in the direction that they will, but anyone who's used all three major cloud-providers knows they're still at the bottom of the totem pole.

MS employee here. No joke, the Microsoft of today is like a 180 from the Microsoft of even 3, or 5 years ago.

Satya Nadella has been on a long-term campaign to transform the culture in some pretty inspiring ways, to be honest. It's led to the departure of long-time fixtures in leadership--the most shocking of which was the head of the Windows team (remember the agonizingly pushy nature of the Windows 10 rollout?). Today, there is no "Windows" team anymore, as they've been absorbed under the "Experiences and Devices" group. And increasingly, open source and embracing of other technologies has become a shocking priority (the decision to move to Chromium-based browser was especially shocking, but on further thought, consistent with Satya's philosophy).

So, yeah! I'm pretty optimistic of Microsoft's future. It's going to take some time to shed a lot of the old image it earned under Bill Gates in the 90's and Steve Ballmer more recently. But in my opinion, I think the company has by now earned what will likely take a few more years to become more apparent to the rest of the world. Basically, the CEO didn't just transform the company from a Windows-based business to a Cloud service provider; he absolutely moved to change the culture as the foundation for that move.

As a Microsoft employee, do you have any thoughts on whether this will cause Microsoft to start a hiring spree of people with active US Government security clearances?

Wait 'til you hear about all of those people who use Excel.

Azure, sure, but Windows and Office are at this point very mature products. They're not going to win awards, but they get the job done.

How is that relevant to the topic or infrastructure comment?

I would rather the military be less capable, because its current capability is being used for offensive, not defensive purposes.

If it's less capable, it's less likely to get embroiled in stupid imperialistic adventures.

Edit: I don't understand why so many people are, at the same time, so enthused by the idea of starving government (Because they think most of its services are a waste of money), while at the same time, insisting on spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory

So I take you approve of Trump's decision on Syria?

He advanced a long-term goal that I agree with (disengagement from Syria) in a manner I found stupid and immoral (abandoning the Kurds with no security guarantees and leaving potentially tens of thousands of IS prisoners free to escape).

> I don't understand why so many people are, at the same time, so enthused by the idea of starving government (Because they think most of its services are a waste of money), while at the same time, insisting on spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

> I would rather the military be less capable, because its current capability is being used for offensive, not defensive purposes.

Same here, that’s why I’m glad this contract went to MS instead of AWS, as I see the latter as being technologically better than MS’s cloud solution.

> insisting on spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined.

While the US military expenditures are ridiculously high, they're only ~34% of worldwide expenditures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...

Because the US government does repulsive things and many of you are enabling them.

What about the fact that privacy is becoming a thing of the past?

I fear Google and Facebook far more than the US Army. I fail to see how rehosting ancient military logistics and business systems translates to a Lojack up our collective derrieres.

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