zlacker

Realistically, though, a year from now nobody will care. I mean, I started in this industry in the "MS is outright evil" era. How many people did they screw over? If I remember correctly, there was even a guy who was owed a pile of stock/stock options and when he got cancer they suddenly went missing (no need to pay the dead guy!). Day by day, year by year, these misdeeds are seen as irrelevant. MS is a different company these days (almost literally). Should we hold them accountable for their past sins forever? (I have a friend who still refuses to buy products from Nestle given their ancient "poison in baby formula is OK as long as it saves us money" stance. That's older than I am!)

In reality, these kinds of antics just don't hurt companies significantly -- even ridiculously horrible things that are arguably crimes against humanity (have I invoked Godwin's law?) In comparison to some of the incredibly awful things companies do (and get away with), this is minor to the point of not even being a footnote in the annals of evil (note to self: don't google that term to check the spelling...).

However, there will be a few of us who will be reminded of why we don't do business with MS (and hence will have no need of WinGet). It won't make any difference, but it will be there.

>>mikekc+(OP)
Fair enough, but your friend is right about Nestlé. They're still doing loads of shady stuff.

>>mikekc+(OP)
Welp, I, for one, have resolved to never by VW thanks to Dieselgate. I can empathise with your Nestle hating friend.

>>mikekc+(OP)
>a year from now nobody will care

I suspect a week from now, 99% of people who read this will have forgotten about it.

>>mikekc+(OP)
About Nestlé's poison baby formula: I though their baby formula was safe, but the problem is that they gave it away (maybe still do?) for free to new mothers in developing countries and when the mothers stopped lactating (because their own milk wasn't being drunk) they made the price hopelessly unaffordable so now the babies couldn't drink from either source, or at least needed to over-dilute the formula.

Totally reasonable to still boycott them, makes more sense than getting annoyed at Microsoft in a situation like this (which is also deserved but more minor in the grand scheme of things).

>>quietb+1d
That's more recent. A long time ago (and I'm working from memory, so best to fact check anything I say, because my memory is terrible) it was common to use a particular rat poison in dry milk (and I forget exactly what it was). There were certain standards as to how much rat poison you were allowed to have. It was well known that this would kill a small percentage of babies, but it was thought to be a reasonable tradeoff at the time. To be fair, it wasn't just Nestle. In Japan, the dairy giant Morinaga had the exact same problem. I believe there were law suits that dragged on for literal generations and eventually things changed.

>>mikekc+Yh
This is the episode I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morinaga_Milk_arsenic_poisonin...

Which was inadverted addition of arsenic specific to Morinaga in Japan, and not Nestle. However, the committe which managed the case and dragged it on was not created by the company but the Japanese government consisting of a newspaper publisher (??), a hospital director, 2 lawyers and a human rights lecturer.

So it seems like an insufficiently related market and lack of oversight made this drag on causing many deaths and even more people crippled by arsenic. One person was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

Compare with China who executed 2 people involved in the 2008 milk scandal and gave much harsher sentences to others. Although that scandal was deliberate rather than a cover up of bad practices.

>>mikekc+Yh
What's the point of even adding rat poison in baby formula? What does that accomplish?

>>mikekc+(OP)
What Nestlé did was unforgivable. It was clearly lead by psychopaths at the time and we have no way of knowing that is not still true.

The problem is people have short memories and are driven by convenience so will conveniently forget how evil a company is when they show another side. Or sometimes they can continue being evil and people still just do nothing because it's so convenient (see Amazon).

There is not enough direct experience of the evil for our monkey brains to make sense of it. If you see someone kill a baby with their own two hands you will never trade with that person again, they are dead to you full stop. If a company knowingly kills babies by proxy and extorts mothers you get mad for an afternoon then you forget. We need to evolve as a species or find some way to make it more real.

>>grenoi+kx
My understanding was that it's while it is in bulk storage in warehouses. It keeps the rat population down. I've been trying to find evidence that I'm correct about this and like another commenter has posted, it may be that I'm confusing the Morinaga problems with Nestle. However, I was sure I heard about Nestle before I heard about Morinaga, but... My memory isn't the greatest :-(

>>mikekc+(OP)
I guess it might help to reaffirm the beliefs of somebody who was teetering in their distrust of Microsoft like myself.

I've been anti-Microsoft for about 15 years but even I'll admit that I've warmed up to them over the past few years because of their seemingly good works (and amazing PR). Stuff like this helps me remember why healthy skepticism is still super important when it comes to giant companies like MS.