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Comment by mlinsey | Hacker News Reader

You die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft...all were everybody's favorite scrappy insurgents at one point.

Once perception shifts the other way, it's hard to turn things around because everyone starts assuming the worst. This incident is a perfect example: the old ToS were standard boilerplate that appears in a bunch of other places, and had most other companies done it, it would have been seen as a non-issue. However, since Dropbox has been receiving other negative press lately (some centering around real issues, some centering around similarly trivial nonsense), that changes how every new story about them is perceived.

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I can't speak for anybody else but I still love Google.

Also, I can't remember ever thinking of Facebook and its culture of (accidental) oversharing without distaste. (The mistrust came later.)

The love for Facebook was when it was colleges only and had no photo sharing, video sharing, etc. It was limited to your classmates.

Not all companies suffer this fate. As long as people are aware that you have good intentions and have great products they will remain quite loyal.

Apple has the best products and basically good intentions. No one believes Steve Job's cares more about money than making good stuff.

Google has the best products and undeniably great intentions. No one believes Larry Page wants anything more than to improve the world.

Facebook's product is sort of mediocre (as Google+ proved) and their intentions have always been kind of borderline acceptable.

Microsoft hasn't had good products or good intentions in a very long time.

"Microsoft hasn't had good products or good intentions in a very long time."

Apart from:

  XBox
  XBox 360
  Numerous XBox Games
  XBox Live
  Kinect

(and controversially, perhaps

  Expression Design

now, sadly, no longer developed)

Okay, fine, one good product in 10 years and bad intentions...

Sun had good intentions

Their products were "bad" (overpriced and mostly technically inferior.)

I'm not even sure their intentions were very good except in the very early days. Hard to imagine Google charging $900 for a $90 memory stick like Sun did.

Charging for their R&D, maybe? Sun did give out a LOT for free. Those sorts of free come with a cost to someone

I should have made it clearer that I wasn't trying to disprove your greater point, only clarify that one division of Microsoft does make good, very popular stuff.

Also... Windows 7, .NET, Visual Studio, Office 2007 (Ribbon overhaul), WP7 (though a way to come yet, but tends to get good reviews, particularly for the UI).

Just because they are not your personal preference doesn't mean that they aren't good products.

Visual Studio is an awful product. It's bloated, performs badly, expensive and extremely unreliable.

Although I do mainly Ruby these days, I still use VisualStudio from times to times and find it quite enjoyable personally.

Which reliability issues did you meet on which version?

VS2010. Mainly the fact that the user interface is painfully slow[1] (either that or I'm unreasonably fast which is rediculous as Vim can keep up with me) and it just dies about 5 times a day on a good day. It might be the solution size though - it's got about 0.5 million lines of C# in it. Still it should work.

[1] On a quad core Xeon with 12Gb RAM, SAS disks and ATI FirePro card.

That size of codebase is definitely an issue :) Last time I had 500k of C#+C++ (5 years ago roughly), I split the solution into around 20 solutions, and used binary dependencies (with CruiseControl.Net on top of that [1]).

I remember reading similar advices in other places as well (and for other languages/platforms, too).

[1] http://mikebroberts.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/enterprise-c...

That looks painful. I'd rather like to move it to an SOA and split it into logical feature partitions and use service composition and windows workflow to integrate it all. Typically, I don't think anyone wants to pay for that though.

Although they bought the program, I have always found Visio to be a great program. Expression Design really had some potential.

I dont think you are being accurate here.

1. Everyone even the most loyal apple fanboy now believes that there is some evil in there. Even pg wrote an essay about it. http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html

2. Google got lot of bad press after the deal for internet deal with sprint and since then have lot of trust in its users.

3. I think microsoft's evilness is perhaps more influenced due to mediocre products than anything else. Its no more evil than modern apple.

"Microsoft hasn't had good products or good intentions in a very long time."

No good products? Maybe we define "good" differently, but saying that MS hasn't had any good products for a very long time is just not true. Maybe this proves how dangerous the press and the bad reputation really is.

This is a really bizarre post.

>No one believes Steve Job's cares more about money than making good stuff.

Really? He gets blasted for being evil almost daily. Personally, I think he doesn't even care about money (since he's thrown away huge sums of money by just not exercising stock options), but a very loud minority (?) disagree.

>Google has the best products and undeniably great intentions.

Disagree on both counts.

>No one believes Larry Page wants anything more than to improve the world.

Couldn't disagree more. I believe Page wants people to think that's all he wants but I don't buy it.

>and their intentions have always been kind of borderline acceptable.

You're being overly kind here, but I agree with the sentiment.

All these people and companies have massive multi-million dollar PR departments shaping their public images and attacking their competitors', it is impossible to know the real motivations for any of them. Microsoft Google and Apple are among the largest companies in the world, there is no reason to trust any of them more than you would trust, say, Walmart or Exxon.

Why does motivation matter? Either the company does good (products, environmentally clean, not beating employees too much, etc.) or it doesn't.

Why should you care what's motivating them? And even if you do care, how can you know, other than by observing their actions?

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