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Comment by colpabar | Hacker News Reader

But that’s my point - who will do that? Who is going to go to their company’s CEO and convince them to put in the massive amount of effort to switch cloud providers? Who is going to say “I don’t think we should use Teams anymore” and actually be able to switch to something else? I have no idea if microsoft even cares about retail customers anymore, but are there really enough people who are going to boycott microsoft products (I honestly don’t know what those products even are) over this?

I just don’t think they have anything to worry about. I personally think it’s good what they’re doing here, but I guess I’m too cynical to believe they are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, and I don’t think the real reason is that they’re worried about bad publicity.

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> are there really enough people who are going to boycott microsoft products

Maybe not, but some is better than none, and I'll continue to push more people to do it, rather than tell them nothing they do matters.

> over this?

Maybe it's not just this. Maybe this is the straw that breaks the user's back. Or maybe the next thing is.

My point was to address your belief that they're too big for anyone to make any difference. That isn't true, and the belief that you or any other citizen can't make a difference is their biggest advantage.

(I put this last because I know what HN will say to this, but: are CEOs and other executives not people too? Can they not make principled moves either?)

> (I put this last because I know what HN will say to this, but: are CEOs and other executives not people too? Can they not make principled moves either?)

Not sure what you mean by "what HN will say to this", but for me the answer is clear - they are, they can, and they often do. As do their employees - or at least they push in the direction which is better aligned with their values.

> Not sure what you mean by "what HN will say to this"

I fully expect some form of cynical "No" as an answer.

I originally had phrased it, "Are CEOs not humans too?" which might make it clearer what I expected :P

That's fair. For the record, I recently dumped windows for linux and won't ever buy/use a microsoft product again if I can help it, and I will encourage others to do the same, but that decision had nothing to do with politics.

I don't think I actually disagree with anything you've said. I am just very cynical, and while I want to believe like you do, I find it very difficult.

edit: "Can they not make principled moves either?" - Yeah, they _could_, but does that _ever_ happen at companies as big as microsoft?

Don't worry, so do I :)

Some people like me are running a company and are still picking out their tech stack. I don't like Microsoft, and that absolutely affects how likely I am to use their services. My situation might not be that common but PR surely still matters some.

> Who is going to go to their company’s CEO and convince them to put in the massive amount of effort to switch cloud providers?

Surely if any movement leads to this, it's BDS, likely the most popular and widely-known boycott since before the end of South African apartheid.

They even appear to have a page and a visualization devoted to compiling publicly visible impacts: https://bdsmovement.net/our-impact

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