Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
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Uncritically associating "trust" with a brand is a mistake. Microsoft are no more on the side of the angels than anyone else (and are very clearly on the other side in some of the legal positions they stake out, such as their amicus brief in support of Oracle against Google in the Java case).
Pick a sports team if you must, but don't pick a brand and support them loyally. Be an interchangeable consumer, because this is how they model your behaviour anyway. Maximise that.
Blindly pick one to trust sure that’s a poor choice.
But we make choices based on our experience and what information we have. I won’t trust anyone forever blindly, but I will pick some for now over others who I find untrustworthy.
But I find it uncomfortable how much brain time we allow for making value judgements about brands -- it's a purely one-way emotional judgement, because as a general rule, not a single one of the people who run them would so much as piss on you if you were on fire in return.
[ Edit: This is not particularly to be taken as an argument for open source; I don't think people in the open source space are inherently more trustworthy; they have just built mechanisms where I don't have to trust them individually or severally.
We have to stop supporting "teams" in the tech world -- even at the level of employee loyalty. It's damaging, and not just to open source, but to human progress more generally. ]
This may be true, but there are longstanding figures in open source who I would not trust as far as I could spit.
It's a mistake to see the openness of open source or open access as a guide to trusting the people who produced it. Dual_EC_DRBG is a good example of why.
I think MS is an awful company that tries to win by destroying the competition using all sorts of legal and illegal tricks to do so.
At the same time, it MS starts a new product, I would trust them to support it for a reasonable amount of time and give a reasonable amount of transition time if they did decide to wind it down based entirely on their history.
OTOH, 4 years ago I thought that Google was a much better supporter of Open Source but even then I wouldn’t trust them enough to not sunset a new product with months of notice at best to actually use something new they came up with.
But at any rate the hosted product and the open source code are orthogonal, right?
You can't use one to guide your opinion of the other. This is the point I am making: we are interchangeable consumers, and yet we invest emotional energy in the pretence that we are not.
Nobody in their right mind would believe that Coca-Cola would prefer you on some emotional level not to be a Pepsi drinker. And yet we, as consumers, allow brand interpretations (Coca-Cola is classic and Christmas, Pepsi's logo looks like an obese person's belly) to gain emotional strength; we extend our personal identities with brand loyalty.
I am slightly late to this party; I perhaps used to think that brand loyalty in customers was something that was meaningfully measured and acted on, and I suspect until the mid-eighties it was, to some extent. But companies are beholden so completely to the whims of their shareholders, or worse their private equity owners, that it's impossible to believe that the continued happiness of customers matters much.
(Nothing to me underscores this more than people overexerting themselves to find positive things to say about Apple's Vision Pro launch, which was so terrifyingly dystopian and anti-human that it made me feel physically sick as a long-term Apple customer, and yet I type this on a Macbook that I would generally say is an object I emotionally value using!)
I also dislike Chrome and any chrome based reskin. I appreciate Firefox and even Safari. Specially Safari for the same reasons the average JavaScript Stan hates it: it’s keeping the web from implementing the latest usb-over-browser crap or wathever the-chrome-consortion (google) comes up with. Safari on iOS is the only thing that keeps “best viewed on Chrome” from happening in current year.
Those are personal opinions though.
VS Code has one as far as I am aware uniquely-implemented feature -- remote editing -- which is absolutely invaluable to me as a freelancer with many long-term, infrequently-updated projects.
Lots of separate VM dev environments with different editor configuration and tool requirements, and more or less only SSH config and keys to connect me to them, from whichever machine I need to.
It's the only Microsoft thing I use at the moment. I don't even have a github account.
To be that one guy, Emacs has had remote editing (without even needing to install anything on the remote server, unlike vscode) for forever with tramp mode. But other, more accessible/modern editors having it is definitely nice because it's such a handy feature
But the VSC approach allows me to customise the tool environment within the remote extension, including going as far as using different SCSS processors and language servers, but is managed through essentially exactly the same interface as the local.
(It's also inherently multi-user; changes are reflected in each machine connected to the remote, which makes it really easy to move from a work to a home machine, or a desktop to a coffee-shop laptop.)
This is what I meant by uniquely-implemented. I often find that the most visceral critics of VSC or adherents of "natively implemented" code editors haven't the slightest awareness of this feature.
Still -- thank you for your comment, it gives me one more thing to investigate for those times when tools fail me.
Much as I love Emacs I do mostly use VSC these days, and I do tend to forget the extent of what remote editing capabilities it provides since I haven't had much reason to use them in a while.
I was thinking more of all the other times this has come up in the past and I have to say, "you understand it's not just a text editor with network access?"
It has pretty much unique capabilities, and as another commenter has said, it's even remarkably agnostic as to the _kind_ of remote container. For example you can run the editor on Windows with the remote as WSL, and it really blurs the boundaries between them in a way that cannot possibly be a coincidence for Microsoft.
With VS Code, I can develop across Windows, Docker, Linux, Linux running on WSL, and macOS with zero configuration aside from setting up SSH connection configs and installing the remote extensions with a button click. All the extensions work seemlessly when remoting. My settings also automatically sync by just signing into GitHub.
With Devcontainers, I don't need anything to develop except Docker and VS Code. I simply pull down a repository, open it in VS Code, and then VS Code sets up a container with all dependencies and configuration.
No, Emacs does not have this experience.
And I don't know the technical reasons why VS Code installs on the remote server, but I think it's important to note that you're not just editing remotely but developing remotely.
(Embarrassed cough)
So, er, I didn’t need to install MacOS Fuse, mount an SSH-FS folder and then use VS Code to open my remote code for editing then?
Thanks for sharing. At least I’ll know next time! :-)
I do all my development on remote supercomputers and the ability to remotely debug multi-process Python and C++ applications running inside containers across many servers made me love vscode.
I think it’s reasonable to not hold hours or even days of setup and learning against a product I’d use in this fashion. Even a tiny 1% productivity benefit obtained after configuration and learning earns me about 2.5 dev days worth of benefit every year. And if I expect to use the tool for a decade that’s almost a month.
Even though I primarily use WebStorm, when I’m working with people on a contract gig, I frequently use Live Share as a pairing tool whether to help debug something or just for training/mentoring.
I’m talking about the remote dev environments. Editing inside VMs, inside WSL, inside Docker containers or via SSH to remote machines, where the editing environment runs seamlessly on the remote, can have extensions, can do version control, run language servers etc.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview
Basically a part of the editor is running remotely, and yet can be managed as if it were local (e.g. an extension can be installed locally or into the remote). So your code is operated on entirely by the remote.
It is, as far as I am aware, unique in its scope.
If you just need those two things there's plenty of options - why are you forcing yourself into vscode ? VSCode is great because of the plugin ecosystem - if that's not your thing use something else - there's plenty of alternatives.
Tech people are pretty gullible. Satya has a good PR operation and many people fall for the “wow it’s the new Microsoft”.
I negotiate with them. They are way more difficult and hard nosed to deal with than in the Ballmer era. The salespeople work under a sword and while they aren’t Oracle, they are in that path.
Trust doesn’t mean much with companies of this scale. You need to understand your contracts and the KPIs that drive decisions at the deal desk.
If you are an individual, why are they giving you this bounty? With Google, their motivations are very clear, and they quickly course correct (ie kill the product) when their objectives aren’t met.
Yeah, I'd believe that.
When people have said they don’t trust Google, that’s precisely the reason they give. Conversely I trust Microsoft and Apple more because their motivations are also clear, and less in conflict with my interests.
I’ve no doubt that Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all equally horrible when it comes to negotiations behind-the-scenes. I’m sure they abuse KPIs as much as each other. As a customer none of that matters to me.
Today ms is the underdog in the digital world. Google is looking to take away every last bit of your privacy and use it against you. And they will kill anything they release in a year or two.
In any case...
I was thinking the other day about how sure I was that MySQL was toast as soon as Oracle acquired Berkeley DB and InnoDB, and then how sure I was it would be hobbled when they acquired Sun and got the whole shebang.
What happened, actually, is that MySQL got better and better, with only a few annoying Oracley missteps along the way (permissions structure changes in a minor release for example).
But what matters in that story is that Oracle vs (big bad) Google was substantially decided for Google, despite what Oracle (and Microsoft) wanted. Because it limits Oracle's power to use the MySQL APIs against competitors in the same way as it limits their ability to use them against Java competitors.
This is what I mean: these are big competing interests. We are small interchangeable customers and consumers. It's worth avoiding investing belief in any of them.
Do you think the amount of time you spend in the File menu is as monetizable as your search history?
I don’t even know how to find common ground with such a take. You’re saying vscode telemetry (which can be turned off by the way) is as bad as other data monetization because building a better product is profitable?
I hope I completely misunderstood you.
And why would Microsoft sell it? Like would you want to sell information like "X% of users can't figure out how to change the code formatting settings"? Or if you did learn something cool and useful, why would you sell it to the potential competition?
Why would anybody pay for customer traffic/browsing/shopping data for inside of a Walmart store? Nearly every retailer would pay for access to that, assuming the cost is reasonable. Vendors desperately want access to it.
Microsoft would be crazy to sell it openly. Its part of their competitive advantage, helping to protect $83 billion in operating income. They'd get tiny particles of revenue in comparison to the gigantic golden egg they're sitting on.
I can't imagine a lot of cases where telemetry would be on sale.
On one hand, telemetry is specific to a specific product. Knowing how often people use the File menu in Visual Studio doesn't help me with my own application that much.
On the other hand, telemetry is potentially a boon to the competition. Can you imagine if say, the LibreOffice project could buy MS Office telemetry to better decide what features to implement, or just to embarrass Microsoft by revealing how much something crashes?
For me, pretty much all telemetry seems to fall into one of those two boxes -- either useless because I'm not working on a clone, or useful and MS would be nuts to sell the info to me because I am working on a clone.
> Why would anybody pay for customer traffic/browsing/shopping data for inside of a Walmart store? Nearly every retailer would pay for access to that, assuming the cost is reasonable. Vendors desperately want access to it.
But Walmart would be crazy to sell it as-is, because why would they help their competition optimize their store layouts/warehousing? At best, I think Walmart might want to sell a derived service, like a slow trickle of recommendations to improve sales. Not the actual underlying data.
Microsoft knows the right CPM for these, because of their telemetry about start-menu usage. And while Microsoft isn't selling that information, per se, they are giving it to partners who consider running one of those ads.
Everything you do as a company, that creates value, also indirectly helps your ad prices if you start selling ads. That is the Google strategy: they used to deliver immense value with little monetization and now the balance has changed.
Having an issue with this with that reasoning is akin to having an issue with a company creating anything of value.
Turn off telemetry, delete ChatGPT conversations, and I like having an LLM for GitHub
versus
Give us all your personal data and we're sharing it with ad partners, your personal data is our number one product and secondary products are only made to support the first endeavor.
What do you mean by this? What kind of information do advertisers get to receive?
Advertisers don't usually receive detailed information, instead they are promised that their advertisements are targeted correctly. To do that the data about people is used.
But with this data Corporate gets too much power. Corporate needs to follow Human Rights, like states. One aspect is that there is no due process in case of conflicts, like someone being wrongly excluded from using a Corporate service. We also need transparency about how this data is used exactly and who else gets views.
Europe is trying to establish transparency with the GDPR, however is foiled by malicious compliance by Corporate. It does not help that Europe is clumsy.
Also, they sell provide it governments in the form of warrant requests.
For more info, read up in google ad auction fraud, and google location warrant.
Microsoft is actually worse though. For one thing, Windows’ default telemetry level lets them pull files off your machine. Here’s a Microsoft apologist explaining it:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-telemetry-secrets/
The US CLOUD Act (which Microsoft lobbied for) means that they have to pull that data in response to US warrant requests, regardless of what country you are in.
Also, they already merged mojang (minecraft) into the Microsoft login umbrella. It is clearly a dry run for when they merge linkedin and github in, so they can provide better worker surveillance capabilities to their corporate customers.
I may be working from old information, but doesn't Windows 10 still have unstoppable, and unauditable, telemetry?
Use a PiHole?
Annoying!
Google and Microsoft are different. The same: I am reluctantly using products from both. The different: Their history and their products.
However I don't think that you should differentiate your trust between them.
We should think about why Corporate does enshittification and how to prevent it.
That LLM was trained on FOSS software that others like myself wrote and did not consent to have used in such a manner. Even if you're also a FOSS contributor and you're fine with it, I'm not.
So you like it, but you're not the party whose consent matters. You're the customer consuming the laundered goods from the fence.
The attribution licenses such as ALv2, BSD, MIT, etc. which are generally considered to be "permissive" still require attribution, and this condition is not upheld by popular LLMs.
Of course, the copied material has to be judged substantial enough for the license to apply in a court of law, which is a human-arbitrated threshold.
It will most likely be a copyleft author who eventually brings a court case, but the attribution licenses do not allow for LLM usage either unless the LLM provides attribution and preserves notices as spelled out in the licenses.
I think it is pretty obvious that lots of GPL authors wouldn’t want their code to be productized in ways that don’t contribute back to the community, because they had the ability to use a BSD or MIT license and didn’t take it.
Legally, of course, LLMs are not people. They don’t have the same rights as people, and it isn’t obvious whether or not they can legally generate new IP. They operate by a complicated but essentially mechanical process, and it is pretty novel to say that such a process could be used to remove copyrights.
But the defendant won't be Microsoft — they just provided a tool, and that's legal. No, the defendant will be the downstream consumer who incorporated the code spat out by the LLM.
It doesn't matter whether the LLM "learned" — intent is irrelevant and the defendant will have committed copyright violation regardless. The LLM can't copyright-wash the code — nobody can.
The point is that there are repositories on Github that contain commits from non-Github-users. For example, not every single commit to the Linux kernel has been made by a Github user, but there is a mirror at https://github.com/torvalds/linux .
> You're playing a dumb game
For what it’s worth I’m not a lawyer and surely get some things wrong but licensing is an area where I have a certain amount of practical experience.
There’s some interesting ground to cover on this topic but we aren’t getting there and the incivility isn’t helping. Please consider this passage from the HN guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Also, take it up with Torvalds:
"And yes, at least under US copyright law, and at least if you see Linux as a "collective work" (which is arguably the most straightforward reading og copyright law, but perhaps not the only one) I am actually the sole owner of copyright in the *collective* work of the Linux kernel."
Don't forget the Office 365 "productivity" measures.
And the latest insanity, at least for me, ads in the settings of Windows 11. Never ever put ads in any configuration menu of the operating system. That clearly says, it's not my computer, its MS's and they try to squeeze every penny out they can get. So they aren't any different from Google, they even try to push you to the Cloud and then make mistakes a cloud enterprise shouldn't make
The Free PC people must be wondering what they did wrong.
Why not? I think they're great: they make more money for M$. If the users don't like it, too bad. Why should I care about them?
>That clearly says, it's not my computer, its MS's and they try to squeeze every penny out they can get.
That's right. It's not your computer, and you should just accept that and get used to it. You chose this path, by choosing MS as your OS provider.
>So they aren't any different from Google
No, they are different: Google doesn't control my PC's OS. The only PC OS they control is ChromeOS, which only runs on certain (usually low-end) hardware, and isn't normally used for any serious work.
> GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...
I don’t mean to be dismissive but unless you did something like that or documented it in some way it’s hard to give too much weight to a “source: trust me” comment from a brand-new HN account.
0: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-worked-with-vs...
To be fair, I haven’t tried it in like 15 years…
If that sounds like 15 years ago, it’s still true (high praise!) except it is more capable.
Personally I find it hard to believe that people use it as their default ides and write a lot of code in it.
but dunno
If something better than vsc comes along, I'll move to it
It’s really a consumer’s decision when it comes to Microsoft. Either you use the basic/free version in exchange for your privacy, or you pay for a business account.
I’m not sure Google really offers that as equitably across their offerings. They seem more focused on driving their ad/data collection business rather than private, enterprise solutions (just my two cents).
Think about Google what you want but Google is never selling your data, it's far too valuable to sell. Advertisers never get to see any of it.
The decision which ad is seen by whom is handled entirely inside Google and your data never leaves them.
Any evidence to support this? Or did you mean everything you send which would be completely expected and normal per their terms? I see no IP traffic when typing but not sending data to ChatGPT.
I think you could only do this by caching the characters and mixing them in with later queries, but that behavior should be visible in the client side code.
Much of the “fantastic” content I do watch on YouTube has sponsored content in the video. Mostly I avoid YouTube.
It's still a Google product that does Google things. If you hate Google things, making an exception for YouTube is saying your standards have a price tag attached.
It's been a very, very long time since YouTube has been very profitable for individuals who aren't playing Google's game or started before that time. Practically any new channel is clout-chasing, appealing to kids or unsatisfied adults in some form, with few able to replicate a momentary success if not following these tactics. Enshittification of the platform has been going on for at least a decade now and Google isn't showing any signs of stopping. A few people making themselves believe "oh well it isn't so bad because tech guides" may as well say "Google Search isn't so bad because I can specify the website and aggressively avoid ads".
But YouTube is the good guy because it.. centralizes content creators and soft-locks them into Google's desired format, be it now or in the future? What, do people think if WEI succeeds, YouTube won't be a future candidate for whatever funny business Google decides on next?
OP doesn't like many products from a particular company, but does appreciate one of them. There isn't a lot to argue with there.
Unfortunately, I don't think Google does any kind of support for their YouTube app on their phones. Casual googling brought me to some forum posts that didn't seem helpful, and I've heard too many horror stories about Google support to put much effort into this route.
Quite unfortunate. Other options (NewPipe, Firefox Android + uBlock Origin) have their own problems. I might try to turn channels into podcasts and listen to them from my podcast player. Maybe that'll work.
because it doesn't do away with _all_ the ads: every video still has the video maker themselves talking about their 'sponsor' for at least a minute, reminding us to 'like and subscribe' for at least ten seconds, and a patreon scroll of users that have paid extra for another three minutes
"Removes _some_ ads!" probably wouldnt sell as many subscriptions though haha
Whenever I use someone else’s account or am not logged in I’m shocked by how ad filled YouTube is. Easily my most automatic subscription and worth every penny.
The creators typically have one 30 second spot where they often do a humorous riff. Not that big a deal.
Google: "Pay the monthly fee to avoid getting slapped in the face with a wet fish."
You: "worth every penny!"
Sometimes this site is obnoxious.
You went from talking about ads to calling this site obnoxious? First of all, if you found my comment obnoxious, it's not "this site" that's obnoxious, it's this user!
My comment was mild. I find the increase in ads on youtube to be obnoxious. You find value in Premium, because you don't suffer ads. It's a fair call to wonder whether the value you find comes from "not seeing obnoxious levels of ads" vs anything else, such as the quality of service offered under premium.
End of the day: my criticism is directed at Google, for encouraging clickbait spammer content; increasing intrusive ads and charging too much in order to not suffer those increasing ads.
Demonetize the shit out of the video, on subsequent offense demonetize whole channel.
Youtube ads can potentially found in all videos and you don't really have a choice because there's no practical alternative to Youtube. So you either pay or use an adblocker (while it works). There's value in Youtube and I can easily see why would someone pay for the ad-free subscription.
Then again creators who choose to advertise or promote commercial products in their videos have a fraction of the leverage that Youtube has. If you don't like them, simply don't watch those channels and find something else. By choosing to promote products they'll implicitly choose to filter out some segments of their potential audience, and that's their choice. Youtube has nothing to do with that, they would place promotions in their videos no matter what service they use as their video outlet.
Creators can't live from YouTube alone (yt premium makes this better afaik, but you still get paid per watch time, which can go against your content or ethics), so they do sponsored ads integrated into their videos. For some the yt-alone revenue is only 20-40% of the total.
> nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads
Assuming you mean the no-ads-plus-music offer, in the UK that is £12.99 a month. So the yearly cost is worth more than a whole month of food for me, and I don't eat badly (I just shop well).
A month's worth of food for a single adult is objectively not a very small amount of money, spread over a year.
Me, I skip the ads, for now.
Most YT ads are abhorrent and incredibly repetitive. Awful music and a piercing voice. I very quickly develop loathing for the brand I see on YT ads.
They'll let their system ban whoever it wants, only letting a human review things if the person is sufficiently large/well-connected. They change their policies on a whim regardless of impact on people making a living off Youtube, same with demonetization, they also continue to allow content-ID and DMCA to be abused and have made search completely useless.
People are still using YouTube not because they like it, but simply because of the existing network effect and wanting to support their preferred creators. Thus it makes total sense why people would be willing to pay creators but not Google.
The sheer amount of content on there for the price is well worth paying. I use adblocks everywhere, I use pihole, I am really strong on that. But I do use Youtube a lot, and it is only fair that I pay the price. It is very reasonably priced.
Over time, Google absolutely has been in a position to abuse data, and to some extent it has done so -- but honestly, if you compare what they COULD do to what they END UP DOING, they're not doing so bad at all. They mostly self-correct relatively nicely.
Microsoft, on the other hand, clearly does the bare minimum. They've had to be dragged kicking and screaming into actually providing a modicum of safety after more-or-less setting the stage for garbage tech security practices.
First they tried to make it better and actually succeeded over the years (anybody who went from Windows 95/98 into 2000/XP and realized MS can actually make stable usable modern OS would probably agree, 7 was their best OS for me). And then they went with telemetry on product that really shouldn't have any, in same vein BIOS or drivers shouldn't have any. And despite overall feedback they doubled down with it in 11. No sympathy nor morality there.
They all have ideas and incentives and motives, and the world hasn't yet collapsed. Yes, watch them carefully, but, e.g. I don't think the world is improved if we just annihilate Google and Microsoft.
Once the government sets about forcing requirements, those two tools ensure that the companies, organizations, or individuals, cannot speak to the requirements or that there was a discussion at all.
Never attribute to malice which can be easily attributed to stupidity. Secret courts, and secret squirrel government activities against its own populace are definitely stupid.
sure there is some dodgy govt stuff going on, but tracking peoples activities and selling it on the open market is pure sleeze
No, secret courts are deliberate and malicious. Hanlon's razor is for credulous fools.
Sure in theory they could be selling access to anyone’s Gmail account to the highest bidder, but that’s going to lose them money by actively driving their customers away.
Google may be actively harmful/evil, but they aren’t stupid.
Nice try Sundar Pichai.
However, I do care about what other uses my data might be used for.
Therefore, googles solution of using all my private data, but with the opensource code running on my machine within my control, is actually perfect for both me and them.
This is the biggest problem. If it's not a big deal, fine -- explain this clearly to everyone how it all works.
Google is likely afraid of a similar backlash as what happened to Apple when they wanted to use local hashing of images.
They might consider it if they couldn’t basically do the same thing via upload data.
I'd say that doing so might drive some of their users (i.e., product) away, but would be a boon for their customers (i.e., advertisers).
And IIUC, they are already selling access to the information they glean from reading the contents of gmail accounts by using that data to "target" ads at gmail users. No, Google isn't literally selling the contents of email messages, but they are selling access to user information based on the content of those email messages.
Based on their behavior to this point, one can be pretty confident that Google/Alhpabet will do whatever they think will maximize revenue and profit, regardless of the impact that might have on their product (i.e., you)>
Any data they have is available to federal police without a warrant.
The federal police are absolutely capable and willing to abuse the data to violate human rights.
The out of control intelligence community in the USA are like the agents from The Matrix - they can subvert any otherwise-trustworthy participant in the system. This means none of the participants are trustworthy.
The amount of fuckery going on the background never saw the light of day back then. People seemed to be happy with them bundling more and more crap in their products, a move that killed most of their competition.
They haven’t given up on that, to the point where they still bundle up apps that only play nice to each other.
Google may be terrible, I won’t argue otherwise. But Microsoft has and will always try to control the entirety of the stack, from hardware to servers to operating systems to applications, in a way that would make any Apple exec salivate thinking about vertical integration.
> from hardware to servers to operating systems to applications, in a way that would make any Apple exec salivate thinking about vertical integration
Apple has the world's most valuable integrated stack. At scale nobody integrates more tightly or better than Apple, and nobody makes more money from that tight integration. It's the foundation of their entire business and has been for a long time.
That's a pretty bizarre premise to suggest Apple is lacking in the integrated approach. That's exactly what they do, very aggressively. Imagine Microsoft building their own processors and then Windows only running on those. You have the integrated salivation inverted, it's the other way around - Microsoft execs can only dream of the business gain they could have if they actually had Apple's level of ownership (over its ecosystem) but over everything Windows touches.
Microsoft doesn't even have a play in mobile OS / mobile app stores. Whereas Apple is one of the duopolists in that critical segment.
You could start your computer, then your browser, then visit a few websites, and never interact with any product not owned by Microsoft, minus perhaps routers and switches. Your traffic could even be routed through some of the undersea cables owned by them, to ad networks ran in their massive cloud.
> Imagine Microsoft building their own processors and then Windows only running on those.
I’m old enough to remember the amount of leverage Microsoft has with the entirety of the x86 platform, e.g. [0]
Microsoft does not need a proprietary hardware platform, although the hasn’t stopped them from trying to lock other OS out (see TPM).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
I always said that the perfect stack was probably a 100% Microsoft stack. Everything they build (OS, email, mice, keyboards, etc.) works great with everything else they build. The problem is that putting even one non-Microsoft item in the stack causes the whole thing to implode.
Want to use a MacBook Pro on the network? Too bad, now your printers don't work. Want to install Chrome? Now you can't use certain Sharepoint features. Plug in a Logitech webcam and now Teams hates you.
In our (mostly) capitalist economy a company not making money will course-correct or fail.
Microsoft is really pushing for its trusted OS platform, with a completely locked down kernel, that will grant them full control over what can and cannot be done on the computer. Google is pushing for the same, but in the browser space. Except their Web Integrity effort has no chance of succeeding unless there's an OS support. One guess who'll be providing that.
Then, once all is in place, there will be a fully opaque content delivery pipeline from online servers to users' HDMI monitors. No peeking.
And that's just one application of the trusted OS. Once people lose control over their machines, it'll open the floodgates for lot more nefarious opportunities.
But, yeah, this new Microsoft is so white and fluffy that it's almost unbearable.
We take the freedom associated with personal computers as granted, but these devices might be the exception rather than the norm.
While the potential for abuse is there, these are the same sorts of concerns raised over UEFI secure boot, and the sky failed to fall over that. You can still run Linux if you want, it's fine.
Things will likely be OK. Maybe more annoying than before.
im on mx linux and life is such a breath of fresh air.
Obviously this isn't perfect because both Google and Microsoft are giant diversified companies with lots of revenue streams, but I think you can roughly understand the way they will behave by looking at them through this lens.
This is why Google sinks resources into Android, but retires projects like their domain registrar: because android is an excellent advertising/surveillance platform: they can not only serve ads using Android, they can collect surveillance info on users to sell better ads.
Conversely, Microsoft invests resources where they do because they want to make the Windows/Office useful for professionals at work. They are sinking billions into OpenAI so that they can develop their Office Copilot to make their Office/Windows platform more appealing to C-Suites writing emails and memos in Outlook and Word
Businesses’ singular pursuit of short-term profits over the past four decades has kept wages down, utterly destroyed the environment, and eroded the global working-class.
It is thus now difficult to trust the same corporations to “do the right thing” or “lead us to a better tomorrow.”
Fool me once…
Finding more or less trust in the newfound altruism of the very same companies at the heart of the system that created or supported all these negative externalities suddenly espousing new and reformed values is rich.
I can’t believe anybody actually trusts them after looking at the state of the world they created. I grant the argument that you might trust one more than the other, relative to one another, but one thing the past century should have taught all of us is that we shouldn’t lend our trust to profit-seeking private companies as they aren’t incentivized to “do the right thing” generally.
I’m all for collective efforts and even companies changing the world for the better. I just don’t think the current crop will suddenly reform with Aquarian awareness and become model benevolent entities suddenly worthy of extending our personal trust.
Maybe after 4 decades of good behavior…
I can run games on Linux and do work on a Mac. Search is still a problem, but I am increasingly turning to ChatGPT for searching anything non current event, with Bing increasingly.
I was a full Google stack, Android, Home, TV, everything, for a few years. I don’t know about trust, but Google products just flat out suck with constant disappointment, and search is no exception.
This is a weird meme given how many billions of searches Google handles daily.
The internet has changed drastically and become orders of magnitude bigger in the last 7 years. Your expectations may be unrealistic when there are so many parties that want to game the system.
Interesting way to put it. Almost like refusing to pay the local thugs for "protection", and seeing the consequences of not paying get worse every year.
Google increased ads on youtube to the point where it's now ugly and excessive. This doesn't make premium more valuable in its own right. It makes avoiding premium more uncomfortable, which is a lot different than your implication that people refuse or can't see the value of premium.
Youtube contains endless "generative fill" content made with all the care and effort of a vending machine. Lifeless, worthless, rinse/repeat content made by content spammers. A slap in the face in terms of value for money.
On Youtube's homepage recently I saw this video: "5 Tallest Building Demolitions in History". Worth a look, right? Wrong. Narrated with an artificial voice, and containing about 11 minutes of stock video clips, padding things out to reach the 12 minute length. The few seconds of demolition footage is fleeting and extremely low quality because the uploader doesn't own the footage.
Netflix isn't infected with such blatantly empty clickbait rubbish, so is a poor comparison if you're tying to say "but you pay $15 a month for Netflix, why not Youtube"?
While Youtube provides a "tip jar" called "super thanks", Google takes a 30% cut of whatever is tipped to the creator, ON TOP of what they take from advertising and premium fees. Google takes and takes. They increase ads as if there's no limit. Do you think advertising should have limits? Or are you fine with YouTube becoming wall to wall repetitive intrusive ads unless people pay the protection fee to not suffer the onslaught?
It's awful, much worse than it used to be, if you're looking for some specific piece of information. Put a word or phrase in quotes, and it will still just ignore it after the first 3 or 4 results and give you a bunch of irrelevant garbage.
However, there's also an army that works to fill every single slightly "wrong" search result with 100's of answers (they're not even necessarily malicious).
I tried to search for HyperPhysics [1] the other day. Yet, for the life of me could not remember the exact name. Hypertextbook, Super Physics, Super Curricula, Super Simple Physics, ect... In some ways its just name collision. Only so many words that mean "hyper, super, awesome" and 10^10 humans that want them.
Eventually a company with great intentions will be dragged to do terrible things if it required to serve their business model.
Google will ruin their user experience (e.g. YouTube, Google) and push the boundary on user privacy in the interest of more clicks & higher CPM.
https://www.wiz.io/blog/bingbang
https://www.wiz.io/blog/storm-0558-compromised-microsoft-key...
My point is... Is the observation in TFA because Microsoft is becoming more trustworthy or because Google is becoming shittier? Anyone who has had the displeasure of installing (let alone actually using) Windows 11 should know the answer.
microsoft has just as shitty of a track record with killing products, poor privacy and overt data collection/telemetry, and just shitty/stagnating products.
like, remember that time they had a myriad of consumer products going on around windows 7/8 era, and then seemingly killed them all? windows phone, nokia/lumia, zune, xbox/groove music, microsoft band, and now cortana. a whole bunch of stuff that made up a holistic experience, that just does not exist anymore, not even presently within just microsoft.
It doesn't make them magically trustworthy or not.
What kind of trust related difference does he see between them?
It's hard for any organization (aside form Congress and Facebook) to not be more trusted than Google.
[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/99615-you-can-now-repair-xbox-...
I believe I "trust" (in terms I think we are using here) Microsoft more than Google - for purpose of business - simply because of decades worth of inertia and ongoing happenstance. Not because of some principled notion of good vs evil manifest as corporate anthropomorphism. Little things like "I can still directly run my 90s code on my windows 11 box" provides very strong degrees of this for me - but only in isolated scopes. Who knows what the hell the xbox or office teams are doing over in their dark corners? Blowing away all this detailed nuance for "aggregate name good/bad" is (to me) the most hilariously shitty way to go about navigating technology when working with vendors who have trillion dollar market caps.
On the other hand, I would "trust" Google to entertain me more than Microsoft via their products & services. I don't get much fun out of bing videos these days.
If I had to get one thing across to the principled crowd - Pretend like you are playing an RTS when working with megacorps. Try to zoom your mini map in just a tiny bit so you can see how the one big red square is actually a shitload of smaller ones.
Nowadays, people spend a lot more time on smartphones than they do on their personal computers. So, Google is far more powerful than Microsoft and arguably even Apple.
With Google, you're the product to be sold.
But Google pretends you're a customer, so you don't resist being sold.
Google's business model is inherently more dishonest.
I mentally make these distinctions with other large companies. For instance, I consider AT&T big and dumb, whereas Verizon is super evil and likely has a Department of Evil (and I wouldn't be surprised if this were actually true).
If Google spun off their cloud division as an independent entity, I’d trust Google Cloud more than Microsoft’s offering.
Yeah, real trust-worthy.
If you've seen even passingly Microsoft's security record for the past 30 years, you'd never trust them as anything but a (sadly) necessary evil for the blissfully ignorant.
Of course Apple is now competing with Mac and IOS as the up and comers as a premium malware runtime engines, becoming as popular to infect as Windows since people have been mislead to believe it's somehow any more secure, but even just an iMessage received can infect.
Now it seems I have learned nothing since now I’m on forums where people are arguing microsoft vs Google vs Apple.
“No company is your friend”, is what I’d say as a kid, and is what I’ll say now too. It must be something about human nature that creates this behavior.
Before we parted for the evening, I had one question lingering in my head; none of us "trusts" a corporation. We each have a healthy dislike of Apple, Microsoft, and Google. But I had to ask: balls to the wall, if the end of the world was on the line and you absolutely had to pick a corporation to get cozy with, who would you reluctantly bed with?
Each of us had no choice but to go with Apple.
I was surprised as anyone, but the other two had somehow simply grown that much less in our estimation. (I had to agree, and I friggin hate Apple. ;))
Don't forget, we're talking hypothetically here. In reality they can all get stuffed.
Also, the reason for me to use GMail is that I want to stick with the same email address, and migrating from GMail would've made it very painful. I use Android because the alternative is to use iPhone, which is even worse. If a free alternative becomes more realistic to use, I'll switch in a heartbeat.
I worked for Google (through acquisition), and I know people who worked for Microsoft. I'd never apply to work for Microsoft. At least based on the impression I've received from people who work there. Of course, there are plenty of businesses Microsoft owns but doesn't actually "run", and things are probably very uneven across the board. Same is true for Google.
So, when it comes to trust... It's obviously a very complicated subject. Different divisions in different organizations will have very different ability to generate trust. In my own experience, and when it comes to things that mattered to me throughout my career, I developed a strong distaste for anything branded with Microsoft's name just based on technical merits alone. Everything Microsoft was making for developers was designed to impress the rich people in the management who probably don't as much as own a computer. Since forever and to this day, Microsoft's products seem like idiotic ideas implemented by legions of slaves, who don't care about the outcome, but the complicated system of equally unmotivated slave drivers ensures the minimum acceptable quality.
Google, on the other hand, gives out a very different vibe: there are a lot of motivated and competent people working for the company, and on an odd day once every few years they get to make a decent product. And then they move on and the product dies.
Based on this completely personal and based on no thorough research feeling, I'd trust the first to make the worst but functional programs and the second to make programs of very uneven quality -- more of a gamble, but with much higher payoffs, if you win.
If someone ask which company is more evil between the Wagner Group or Apple, I'd choose Apple without thinking.
Forcing interoperability, applying anti-trust, outlawing agressive adtech etc. are perfectly valid steps and would help create a large amount of competition and choice around technology. In such a scenario there would be also more opportunity for open source business models.
Google was supposed to be not that, and so it's not that I trust Google less, it's that I don't know how much they can/can't be trusted in general.
I see exactly the same in Dutch government. Im absolutely not allowed to deploy on Google cloud, because of GDPR reasons, yet somehow Azure is never an issue.
Microsoft has been playing the government contract game for decades, and probably the biggest leeches of public money (next to some consultancies) ever existed.
>When you become a publicly traded company, promises like "Don't be evil" cannot be honored
I'm usually the king of cynicism... but is this really what people believe?
While that's extremely common nowadays, it's also fucking stupid.
I mean, while that's likely quite true, what i would RATHER have is neither of those two...
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
as a consumer, yeah. but I can still mostly avoid them.
google hasn't needed to market themselves like that
feeling any sort of 'trust' towards either, outside the context of something like a legitimate business contract, seems to me like a media literacy problem
(Yes, they put someone else in as CEO: so what? Yes, they've largely disappeared from public view: so what? Page and Brin still exist and still control Google even if they have a lower profile than eg. Zuckerberg and even if they aren't jumping up and down in public like the current owner of Twitter: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence . If Sergey Brin is able to start poking around inside Google again because he's worried about competition from OpenAI https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2023/01/31/sergey-... then he's also perfectly well able to come back to scotch the Web Integrity API. The fact that he hasn't done the latter is simply a choice that he has made.)
Some people are too young to remember, and some seem to have forgotten, how much Google's rise to dominance was enabled by the perception that Page and Brin were two fine young men who could be relied on to act with restraint and a sense of public responsibility—a perception which Google itself of course encouraged. If they'd had the same public reputation as Bill Gates or Larry Ellison then the early history of would likely have been very different. (Now, more fool the rest of us for putting stock in that perception, of course, but that doesn't let Page and Brin off the hook either.)
So, what happened there? HR scandals and maybe health issues seem to have helped drive them out of public view. The end of Google's all-hands meetings also seems rather significant, though it doesn't seem clear whether it was more a cause or a consequence of other changes (Back in 2019 Steven Levy wrote "That’s why, when Google said Thank Goodness It’s Finished, it ended a lot more than a weekly meeting. Winter has come to Silicon Valley. And no beer for you." https://www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-en... , which now seems prescient.) It also looks as if they simply got bored of running Google, and seem to believe that simply running Google is beneath them. Cut off from normal life, it also seems likely that they've been radicalised by an antisocial subculture of billionaires and cent-millionaires. But others must know much better than I do.
It's all cyclic. One generations hero is the next's villain, and as we all move away from the villain we find new heros, those become villains as old heroes re-invent and we all move zigzag into the future.
Just look at what happened with compiled / static vs dynamic / "productive" languages from the 90s to 2030s. It's been less of a roller coaster and more of a pendulum.