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Comment by khalic | Hacker News Reader

You're talking like it's business as usual. None of these companies had anything similar to this retaliation

Microsoft had it worse. Bill Gates was openly hostile and dismissive of the US government during Microsoft's anti-trust investigation, he believed anti-trust law was illegitimate and shouldn't apply to tech companies. He did not take the investigation seriously and repeatedly argued with investigators in his court deposition. In response, Microsoft got raked over the coals by the government, the company was almost broken up, and Gates stepped down as CEO after the debacle.

Now Microsoft stopped fighting the government, and is one of the US government's biggest partners, with massive DoD Azure cloud contracts.

Microsoft had it worse because Gates was a megalomaniac who was so self-absorbed he didn't understand he was supposed to bribe via "donations". Tech companies all learned the same as other sectors; it's more profitable to have lobbyists greasing the wheels of corrupt politicians from the get go, and "donate" to their success for a lifetime of consultation and quid pro quo.

This is also why all virtues signaled by corporations should be treated as lies unless they are legally bindable, and there are actual consequences for false and misleading advertising, fraud, etc other than a rounding error and cost of doing business.

It's only been several years since all AI companies signaled virtues about morality and ethics by not working with the military. Now they all do.

That's such a bad state of existence for people within that Government. How could anything be improved by new companies from now on? A corrupt government would never make bribes illegal, but a scrum style bribe-outcome management could become measured and used publicly? No idea where all this goes..

It should be patently obvious where all of this goes.

This is the first time I have seen refusing to pay bribes framed as a moral failing and character flaw.

Perhaps it's not that he "didn't understand he was supposed to bribe" but rather that he thought that system was bad and antiquated and that he was taking a principled stand for the modern (of the time) technology industry to move away from those historical norms.

It didn't work, but he's not bad for trying.

Bribes are a feature of politically-controlled economies, not a bug.

Thirty years ago when this was all going down, I believed the narratives of the time. Greedy Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer pushing IBM's OS/2 out of the consumer market with aggressive DOS and Windows OEM deals.

I mean, they absolutely did do that, but I think the motivation was competitive survival.

The Steve Ballmer interview really shed a lot of light on this, particularly the portion about the IBM and Microsoft OS/2 divorce: https://youtu.be/CYC49_aeop0?t=1476

I find it simultaneously amusing and depressing that you took my comment as a promotion of bribery, rather than a stark commentary on the sytemic corruption that has destroyed Americas democracy, and is destroying liberal democracies worldwide.

How the system has self-corrected to empower the most greedy and sociopathic of behaviours, across all private and public institutions, the entire time; so much so that the average person can't even comprehend the root causes, or any solution beyond a simple band-aid non-solution.

There's a difference between ignoring the government while you're blatantly breaking the law and they're suing you for it, and not proactively reaching out to the government while they're breaking the law.

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