Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Is it really so hard for companies to not do these shitty things? What would the increase in profit be? Does outweigh all the negative PR? Do they even think about this? There must be some rationale....

View on HN

It does not. Probably the decisions are not thought out that well. In the end these things haunt them for years. Look at m$, even after all the years of open sourcing, contributing and etc. they are still not trusted. Few other examples pop to my mind: medium.com, oracle, google (graveyard), ethereum (fork), 2016+ apple keyboards and so on

Except that it doesn't really matter and most people in general don't care because they don't know. Say what you want about Microsoft, but the fact is the world runs on Windows and MS Office with exceptions for fraction of macs and some weird geeks running some funny penguin systems. Not only that, but if you're young enough you never had a chance to experience the 'evil Microsoft'. Same goes in similar fashion for other companies you've mentioned: Oracle/Ethereum - what's that? Google - the world runs on it and Gmail. Apple keyboards - 'it works for me' and so on and so forth, sadly.

I think it's more that actively boycotting companies and their products causes stress that many don't want to bother with, especially when there's no practical alternative. Accepting the norms is less socially confrontational.

I do agree with you on general point. However, I don't think reputations are to be dealt in absolutes. I would like to discuss your points one by one:

> Microsoft

* MS Office is still the best office suite as of today, I don't think anyone would argue.

* Windows is still the most 'compatible' and 'easy to use' OS today for non-apple hardware. I don't think penguin system users will argue. This is coming from someone who used linux with breaks for 10~ years. It is still _hard_ to get it working as it was years ago. However, for years I heard many developers refusing to consider anything .NET, MSSQL,... related to be picked for tech stacks due microsoft history and current ecosystem. Money definitely lost on their part

> Oracle

* Same, tech people refusing to get involved with Oracle due their litigious nature. Money definitely lost

> Ethereum

* I am not the best person to talk about this and this might not be the example. Fork reduced my trust in cryptos in general as my expectations were different.

> Google

* Gmail is great email service. On top of that free. Same with Google search. However I would argue that Google new products which "lock you in" will not be as popular because of their abandonment of many services

> Apple keyboards

* This is more personal, but I saw similar experiences from others. Terrible keyboard, terrible replacement keyboard reduced my trust so much that I moved from their ecosystem. This is on top that components were soldered resulting in non modular expensive laptops (can't replace it myself fast/cheap). Money definitely lost on their part

Edit: formatting

Considering MS past tactic was to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, I can understand why people are careful about Microsoft embracing open-source.

Why should we trust them? They are still a company. They still do evil things. And even their open source-work is not always free of shame. It's true that they have become less ignorant and toxic, but they have not become good. They contribute for their own benefit, not some greater good. We can trust them today to the same degree we could trust them 20 years ago, except now the areas wher we can trust them have grown in numbers.

They probably believe used product sales are lost sales. Same rationale they use for spending millions fighting copyright infringement.

What do you think? Of course they thought about this, they are not stupid. They calculated they would make more money, and that's all they care. They're a corporation after all, no other considerations enter into their thinking, only one: maximising profit.

This is, broadly speaking, the perspective of someone who hasn't had the pleasure of interacting with corporate bureaucracy :)

Companies do dumb, expensive stuff all the time. Aside from quite often deliberately doing stuff that doesn't "maximise profit", they also frequently make quite catastrophically bad decisions which accidentally avoid "maximising profit".

It's baffling to me that you ascribe such a level of skill and professionalism, when most organisations seems to be accidentally successful!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com