Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zetice | Hacker News Reader

The answer to this is to not agree to it (your “chance” is to stop using the service).

This “solution” is a non-starter. People like to imagine that we have a marketplace with degrees of freedom in all directions, but we don’t. We have to make choices, and often that just means choosing the least bad option.

But it is interesting to note how we got here.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/13/1187543648/terms-and-conditio...

To summarize the podcast episode, contracts used to be individually tailored, but businesses found that too onerous and just wrote boilerplate contracts for all customers to sign. Then they decided the signing part became too onerous for businesses so courts decided that using the product was enough to agree to terms. So now we’re at a point where not using the product is legitimately the only way not to agree to whatever terms the company decides.

Non starter is a term often overused

If your point is that its use is invalid here, then say why.

Because this is not a non-starter as suggested. I leave services because of their terms... I have rebuilt services because of their terms... You start what need to.

I want a political cartoon: Panel #1 shows "The Free Market Ideal" with people bustling about, negotiating with the owners of wooden carts filled with produce and goods, lots of people and energy. Panel #2 show "The Free Market Reality" with a bunch of tired people waiting in line for one of two computer terminals, one of which is showing an error screen and it appears may have broken (the other is showing a ToS).

and simply call it oranges to apples!

after all, you can argue/haggle/negotiate with a myriad of software developer firms (who are happy to build and operate a bespoke service for you). you can also do the same with many service providers, all you need is a big enough order and they are eager to give discounts. big enough check and you can pick and choose T&C too.

free market or not, market forces, mostly supply-and-demand and barriers to entry and costs lead to very few choices.

however, it's likely that the accumulation of software technology and decreasing costs will make a lot more features available in service form.

Wait, are tou seriously suggesting you do have an inherent right to use the services of a private company?

Hobson's Choice is not something to be celebrated.

Exactly. And it's actually quite easy for some of these products (except maybe for PayPal if you don't have a bank account).

Yeah, just change place of work everytime when company asks you to do somwthing with any Microsoft product.

Is this your solution?

Are the terms for Microsoft business customers different to those for end users, with regards to privacy and tracking? Can my ssl232@mycompany.com email provided by Office365 get tracked around the internet just the same as ssl232@gmail.com?

It probably is tracked but you don't care unless you are using company provided accounts/infra to do personal stuff and then that's your actual problem

If this is your work account then switching is down to your employer and they probably have a legal dept to understand all ToS anyway. But any ToS change shouldn't affect you much because you shouldn't be using it for personal stuff.

I don't think the venn diagram of companies using outlook/office365 and companies with a well resourced legal department has as much overlap as one might hope

It doesn't. I know companies with as little as 3 people who are Microsoft business users, of course.

I'd expect the set of companies with a well resourced legal department to be almost fully contained in the set of companies using outlook/office365.

What else is there for corporate email?

Mine uses gmail. It works well enough.

Any company that has concerns about Office 365's ToS isn't even going to consider looking at Google services.

Why? I assume you read O365 and GW terms and compare so what's the diff?

That's why 'probably' ;)

(But you should think twice whether working for a legal entity where no people know legal stuff is a good idea)

As the other comment hints: most companies don't have lawyers. And then they'd probably be specialized in another area. Only very large companies can afford to have legal staff looking at some random ToS change.

Fast approaching. I used to be a fairly happy Microsoft....uh...person-slash-developer. It isn't worth the stress of trying to make their shit work these days. Their last chance with me was the Power Platform. Absolutely horrid POS. Then a story breaks that reveals epic security flaws in the same platform (and across Azure nonetheless). High amount of wtf moments. Stay away for mental health purposes...I'm serious.

Yes? You can work decades in many careers without touching a Microsoft product.

Ut more importantly, you have no right to Microsoft products, and it regularly blows my mind when people try to argue otherwise.

Besides, if your beliefs are so incompatible with society that they exclude you from holding down a job, that belief becomes a pathology, not a conviction. Understanding how to operate successfully in society is a critical part of being an adult.

At least in my corporate experience, it's hard for IT to avoid the pull of Exchange + Outlook. And it's hard to work at a company when you refuse to use email.

Hard is not impossible, and if you want to put strange moral constraints on who you work for, that's your cross to bear.

Interesting. So riddle me this.

Microsoft goes to great lengths to court primary education systems to instill themselves as the "taught software stack". You say no one has any right to Microsoft's products... Then does that not run into somewhat of a public contradiction when public education systems shove it down students throats?

In point of fact, it sounds like the publically taught option should be exclusively GPL or other FLOSS software offerings, because contrary to your assertion, every student does have an implicit right to those as a public good.

No, in no way at all is what you just described anything resembling a "contradiction". If you've used Google Docs or Libre Office for more than 5 seconds you'd know that.

If you want to nationalize Microsoft, petition your congressperson to do so.

I disagree that this qualifies as a choice. (Though it does appear to be the prevailing opinion)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com