Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

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Not having those protections in place would be a company ending event for Microsoft. The legal system would crush them, and customers would leave in droves.

And the number of markets Microsoft completes in now is tiny. This isn't the 90s where Microsoft competed in slews of consumer and business markets. The potential upside from the Cloud team slurping up secrets from competitors in literally ANY other business segment, is dwarfed by the losses that would hit MS.

Now of course that doesn't mean some corrupt fool in sales won't risk destroying the company so he can make his yearly bonus (that very thing has brought down companies before!), but Microsoft internally has a lot of motivations to ensure that doesn't happen.

So, don't trust Microsoft saying "trust us". Trust Microsoft being greedy and wanting to keep growing the cash cow that is Azure Cloud.

I wasn't talking about Azure. I was talking about Microsoft's software products such as Outlook, Windows, etc.

Rergardless, my point is that Microsoft saying that they have audits and controls in place is exactly the same as them saying "trust us". They're just saying "trust that we have effective controls in place".

What exactly can an org do. We hire outside verifiers and then meet their standards.

Sure, I understand. The thing is that a company has to already have a measure of trust in order for the verification to be of reassurance to people. Hiring outside verifiers is absolutely better than nothing, but it's not a thing that inherently instills a high degree of confidence.

What an organization can (and should) do is to behave in a way that earns people's trust over time. Microsoft actually had a window of opportunity to do this. They even made a very public campaign proclaiming how they weren't like the Microsoft of old and were more trustworthy than they used to be. And for a while, I even thought that perhaps a real culture change really did happen. But their behavior (especially around Windows and Office) is uncannily similar to that of other companies of questionable trustworthiness.

Suppose I'm using services provided by JohnFen's employer. What does it do better than Microsoft that I can trust it with my data? What should Microsoft do to be a trusted partner?

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