blahblah12

Unfortunatley like many of the other comments have pointed out. This is incorrect. Most of the military currently uses Teams and O365. The military deal for hololens is going through and the shipments are greater thant he initial order. That information is dated.

I think the European acronym, GAFAM, is more applicable. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM

Comments were deleted.

So we’re suggesting a 3rd-party PR firm likely coordinated public criticism about Zoom, an app that was undergoing hyper growth and entered the public consciousness in 2020 due to WFH and COVID. We don’t think media outlets would likely have wanted to voraciously cover Zoom stories because Zoom became one of the most widely used apps out of nowhere?

The logic appears to be: I saw a lot of news stories about X, therefore X was caused by Y, without recognizing that Z is just as likely a cause for X.

Um, just think of what you're suggesting. At MS some department (marketing, sales, product managers, devs?) somehow coordinated a bunch of press leaks (not sure how these were even determined to be 'leaks'), made sure that media outlets collectively believed that they were problematic, and then used those leaks to influence sales?

It's a stretch to attribute to malice what can be attributable to other environmental factors. Could it be that Zoom was/is the dominant player in the video conferencing space in 2020/2021, so media outlets were keen to cover stories around Zoom? WebEx and Google Hangouts vulnerabilities have also not received as much coverage as Zoom.

Reading through these vulnerabilities, it feels like a handful of these are low priority or non-issues. This might be a controversial opinion, but it’s not clear to me why these issues ought to be prioritized and fixed expediently.

For example, it’s not clear to me why an IP address leak is considered problematic. And breaking chat or crashing on reload seems more akin to a bug a la iMessage link bugs like https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/18/16904774/ios-iphone-bug-c.... That type of issue should be fixed, but it’s not a vulnerability that’s meaningfully exploitable for either remote code execution, stealing client credentials, or stealing client data.

Wrong, Microsoft’s internal incentives are aligned with GitHub remaining independent and building developer mindshare. The, relatively, minuscule business they get from MPA (No Azure, Office subs, Windows subs) is extremely fringe in comparison to losing long term developer mindshare. Even if you thought of representative companies in the MPA,e.g., Netflix, Warner, etc., which are only loosely coupled to the MPA itself, this is still tiny in contrast to overall developer mindshare. This is why they reinstated popcorntime etc etc.

This makes no sense to me. An iPhone without a browser? There are a dozen other random apps and features in O365. Is bundling or building of these features prohibited because Microsoft Access competes with Airtable? I’d argue Teams is half zoom half chat. It’s about as similar to Slack as Access is to Airtable.

Even the selling separately argument seems absurd. How is this any different than adding another Office SKU?

This was an accident. It took a bit to remedy but that was not the intention.

This is called cross-org transfer pricing. It's a common practice in accounting. In fact, imagine a company where this doesn't happen. Retail decides that they can "excessively" use AWS. This contributes to waste and problematic accounting when it comes time to report finances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_pricing

100% this. Mermaid is fantastic for the happy path, but as soon as you run into any issues, the lack of flexibility makes it nearly impossible to use (It tames more time to use mermaid than to go back to traditional diagramming tools).

That’s definitely not verified. I’ve read that rumor multiple times and each time, it hasn’t happened.

On another note, having listened to James Whittaker talk while at Microsoft, he was a phenomenal storyteller and speaker.

Anecdote, at one of the affected companies and we’ve been wfh. I honestly think my productivity has tanked. That’s the general sentiment for other folks that I’ve talked to, too

Does not surprise me. Just wanted to clarify that the Microsoft donates to X line is a lot more nuanced than the monolithic portrayal by OP

So employees donate money to a fund that they then don’t have a say in and for reasons that might be as unrelated as wanting to get good seats for a talk by Phil Knight.

This independent org then donates across party lines to issues that the manager believes are aligned with corporate interests that may also conflict with other corporate interests such as green initiatives and LGBTQ issues since a republican senator might be for rural broadband access but not gay marriage.

There was also an internal movement to try and starve the PAC by not donating to it.

And TBC, throwing a wrench in this even more, from a pure money perspective we’re talking about tens - hundreds of thousands vs. 1 billion.

Really, my point is that, like any large organization, a manichean view of things is not sufficiently nuanced and does a disservice to the complexity intrinsic with large groups of people.

Those are references to Microsoft PAC which is funded by small donations from thousands of employees. Folks sometimes donate small amounts because they can go to events where interesting speakers are invited like Michael Lewis, Phil Knight, Will Smith, Chelsea Clinton, Arianna Huffington etc. As an employee, you do not have a say in capital allocation. In fact the PAC donates to both sides. The only agenda historically is what is in Microsoft’s corporate interests from taxation policies to h1bs etc. Representatives didn’t always fall cleanly into either camp. For example, while McConnell might be a climate denier he might have supported a favorable taxation policy, rural broadband policy or h1b policy. Perhaps Schumer supported favorable h1b policies but not corporate tax policies so he would be allocated capital proportionally.

https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?cycle=2020&strI...

47% Dem 53% Rep split.

https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgot.php?cmte=C00227546&c...

It was a very bizarre and independent function. After employee frustration, they suspended the PAC

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/internal-email-microsoft-suspe...

It looks like the courses use cognitive toolkit aka CNTK for deep learning. This is sort of the equivalent of watching a class from Google where they use tensorflow or fb where they use pytorch.

this. so much this. A thousand times this. You have no idea how much it affects you to be in a city that has gray skies for like 3/4 the year. You can go days without seeing the sun in the Winter. Honestly, I theorize, half-jokingly, that Seattle's startup scene never took off because people get too depressed by the weather and give up.

I'm pretty sad about this. Most companies let the product orgs own naming after a legal check, but we let Marketing. They're supposed to do market research on names? You would not believe the hurdle that naming causes and how many empty cycles get spent on just coming up with a name. It feels like a battle of attrition.

I totally get where you're coming from, but Outlook is literally Accompli renamed. I see the opposition to Sunrise being folded into the Outlook client (it's not standalone), but To-Do is effectively the same as Wunderlist but their V2 that they've been gestating on for more than a year (a more to-do oriented view).

Working at the company, and in this division. I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. You should probably look at the titles of these people now. As in, directly reporting to Rajesh, and Satya. Fowler owns OneNote in addition to Wunderlist and all Education initatives. They're essentially at the highest levels of leadership in Office at the company. Try clicking on a linkedIn profile.

It's not really killed. The original Sunrise, Accompli and Wunderlist teams still work at MSFT and they're working on their new apps respectively (Javier runs all of Outlook now). And Chad Fowler (former CTO of Wunderlist), and company are behind the pivot to To-Do. It's the exact same application. I've been beta testing it and it just has few additional features that will show up over time. It's really just a rebrand and a skin and a new backend they're trying to rapidly improve.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/fowlerchad/ - CTO Wunderlist https://www.linkedin.com/in/jsoltero/ - Accompli founder https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianreber/ - Wunderlist Founder https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierrevalade/ - founder Sunrise https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremylv/ - founder Sunrise/Design

They all got promoted really quickly and have large portfolios (including their original apps and teams) , but now with a mandate to fix the other similar core applications, too. If anything, this crop of teams and ppl now run huge portions of Office -- not the other way around. And they're the ones deciding strategic vision.

These acquisitions were also acquihires. The CEOs/CTOs have high leadership positions now (they went from Partner GEMs -> CTO/CVPs in about a year or so) and are trying to make all of Office better.

I think every time a MSFT article comes up, ppl get in an uproar. Give the company a chance and check your bias at the door.

Yep, same one.

Dude this decision was by the Wunderlist team, they're all still at the company.

It's the same exact ppl working on it. The CTO now runs a ton of teams at MSFT. They just cloned the app with a different backend and a few new features. The only thing that changes is the brand. It's like accompli. https://www.linkedin.com/in/fowlerchad/ - runs a ton of things now

Christian is an EIR - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianreber/

The rest of the accompli and sunrise teams are around, too.

It's not really killed. The original Sunrise, Accompli and Wunderlist teams still work at MSFT and they're working on their new apps respectively. Chad works on Wunderlist. Javier still runs outlook. They just absorbed a bunch of other apps too

It's pretty much a replica of the original app. It's being developed by the same team that made Wunderlist as in Chad Fowler and company (he has a larger portfolio now). Most of these comments are probably unnecessary. The original team still works at MSFT The app is simply a rebrand that's trying to add additional features over time.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/fowlerchad/

"This is certainly a bug. It is not a targeted attacked against Linux users. Report it to Microsoft. Microsoft is just doing really shitty feature detection using User Agent strings instead of, well actual feature detection. I was able to reproduce the same result by setting my User Agent to Firefox 52 on Windows 98. If I set it to a "more realistic" user agent like IE 7 on Windows XP, it would actually redirect me to a busted page to upgrade my browser instead of Word Online. It appears if Microsoft cannot figure out your User Agent (including your OS as part of it), it gives you a busted experience."

lol, It wasn't nefarious read the reddit thread.

read the analysis of the bug. it wasn't malicious or intentional.