Are we talking about the same website?
I'm not sure what more you expect?
If Apple does something – this is obviously the correct thing to do, and everyone should copy them.
If Microsoft does the same thing – meh, no one cares.
If Google or Meta does the same thing – pitchforks, outrage, a thousand daily top-voted blog posts detailing how terrible these companies are.
Goes to show how much of the current outrage culture is driven by marketing and perception rather than reality.
People use to hate Microsoft because it was a monopoly. Apple was the underdog. Ultimately the MS hate was the perfect case of watch what you wish for.
Because both companies back then were actually selling stuff to users.
Then came the culture of "do not evil" and "move fast and break things". Users became product, the only clients are the advertisers. Technology was not sold, it was simply provided for "free".
This undercut the old MS monopoly which survived because of its corporate stranglehold. Apple flourished through devices and could afford to take the moral high ground on privacy.
But the political and regulatory normalization and extreme profitability of surveillance capitalism means that there is no technology company today that can afford not to be an adtech company.
And if you haven't noticed, literally every tech company (apple, Amazon, Ms, Netflix,...) is now attempting to get in on the online ads market.
Nice?
HN users tend to use more Apple and Linux. If Microsoft gets more of a pass my guess is it's because no one expects anything from them. The opinion of many HN users about Windows and Edge is already very low.
Here are some of the recent posts I can find about Edge and Windows. There's no shortage of outrage and frustration:
Microsoft Edge removes ability to delete Sync Data from Cloud - Jun 2023 (186 points, 118 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36267087
The Day Windows Died - Apr 2023 (1146 points, 894 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35415758
The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge - Mar 2023 (506 points, 377 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35207830
Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11 - Dec 2022 (543 points, 654 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33943777
This is either the result of decades of marketing or astroturfing.
There’s also the general media trend of punching up / publishing surprising content so it gets clicks. Google especially had the reputation for being “good” for so long that any kind of expose or criticism rings as juicy and surprising. Microsoft had the reputation for being “bad” for so long that they are expected to be bad; it’s them being “good” that is surprising and gets clicks.
In addition this I think a lot of software professionals hate Google because they failed the interview.
“If they can, they will.” The past 20 years has been a steady march towards desensitizing users towards making users give up their privacy.
And Google is the biggest privacy invader out there.
Google's main product is YOU. Without your privacy, they would have nothing to sell to advertisers --- which accounts for about 80 percent of their revenue.
You’re speaking on an agenda without accounting for reality
More then 80 percent of MSFT's revenue comes directly from selling software and services.
Google earns about as much money from privacy invasion as MSFT does from software and data services. You can try to deny or ignore the reality of it --- but you have nothing to refute it other than personal bias.
Google's privacy invasion spans the globe.
They have the world's most popular browser feeding them user's web activity. They have the most popular mobile OS feeding them users' physical location. They operate the world's most popular email service feeding them users mail habits and purchase receipts. They have trackers embedded on virtually all of the world's most popular web sites.
It is really possible for anyone to get more "predatory" than Google?
There are more mosquitoes than tigers