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Comment by strangeloops85 | Hacker News Reader

Somehow Microsoft Research manages to be a much more open place than Google and has researchers publish critical pieces all the time. It's ultimately a bit sad that Google, the company started by two PhD students, is incapable of creating a similar culture to MSR.

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> Somehow Microsoft Research manages to be a much more open place than Google and has researchers publish critical pieces all the time.

Can you give examples of these critical pieces? I can't think of any, but MSR publishes a lot of stuff...

Google didn’t have time to establish and solidify corporate culture before the current trends began.

Microsoft was more entrenched and stable.

IIRC MSR was started by Rick Rashid (the inventor of the Mach microkernel that NeXTstep and Mac OS X are based on), and it was always very independent of the rest of Microsoft and its business priorities.

MSR was started by Nathan Myhrvold who recruited Rashid. Well, "started" may be ambiguous here. Nathan proposed it.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/nathan-myhrv...

I have no insider knowledge, but from the outside it sure as heck looks like Microsoft has rebuilt its internal culture since the founding of Google. It certainly doesn’t feel like the MS of Bill Gates or the MS of Steve Ballmer anymore.

If that is true, wouldn’t this imply that the difference between the two isn’t time since these unspecified “trends” began, but instead quality of management?

not surprising. please read 'the age of surveillance capitalism' nearly every move by google (and friends) post-publication (of course, any move pre too) can be captured by the thesis of the book.

This behavior starts all the way at the top with Sergey. See Google's leaked internal all-hands[1] after Trump won basically calling for the end of the world without any regard to employees who may be fiscally conservative or Trump supporters. Google is by far the worse of the big bay area tech companies in terms of stifling speech, equality of outcome policies, and being an echo chamber.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/12/leaked-video-from-alphabet-t...

Google doesn’t have any obligation to its Trump supporters. It is an entity outside of its employees and its decisions issue from the CEO and Board. If you don’t like their decisions don’t work there.

Ironically I've found YouTube's policies to be far more liberal & open than Twitter or Facebook's. I think Sergey was wrong to kick off about Trump so publicly, but he is also the guy that pulled Google out of China on principle alone. A mixed bag, for sure.

Trump was and is a clown. Brin, in that video, was expressing his personal feelings (that he doesn't like Trump) being a refugee himself. He was not expressing company policies.

That was supposed to be an internal forum. From what I've heard executives treated internal q&a sessions as public press conferences afterwards and try to be "politically correct". Not a good outcome for anyone involved

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