Just like the OP I have first hand info on how atrocious Microsoft’s internal privacy controls are.
The later versions of Windows are just ad space for Microsoft to advertise.
Azure is the worst of the 3 cloud providers. Horrible developer experience and documentation and reliability.
That said, I would still take Satya’s Microsoft over Balmers any day
Lets not use emotionally driven, ambiguous terms like 'evil' to describe these kinds of things. Google is not, for instance, conspiring to commit genocides, nor is Microsoft planning a coup in an Eastern European nation with the goal of colonizing them to use as indentured technical support.
What do you want a corporation/company/business (of any size) to be driven by?
- Ethical Metrics (could be solved by allowing corporations, directors, boards to face similar punishments to humans committing crime).
– Something that measured employee treatment.
Profit is such a shitty motive... it's effective, but still shitty.
I'd agree they are both evil in that they both seek to leverage your personal data against you for their own gain, but it sounds like Google does it while being more protective of what they've taken from you while MS also leaves you vulnerable in new ways through carelessness.
I'm not too worried about Bing though. That's nothing compared to Microsoft's access to your computer at the OS level. We know anything we do online will be seen by others, but being able to snoop on our personal files and log our keystrokes is a whole lot worse than knowing what we type into a search engine.
However improved/more popular Bing becomes, eventually Bing will end up in the same position Google is in now where they'll have to make their web search worse in order to constantly shove ads in your face instead of returning results that are useful, and slowly SEO spam will adapt to pollute Bing's results further. Google may not even mind if Bing starts gaining users. At this point Google can collect so much data from android devices that I doubt they need google search to peer into our lives like they used to anyway.
The primary driver for humans is status. Status in the military is achieved through leadership and honor. Status in academia is achieved through capability. These sectors provably show that people can be driven by things other than money.
The sad thing here is that there are tradeoffs. Nothing is as efficient or as effective of a motivator as money. But money is the driving force that is most detached from ethics.
The media likes to make a big deal out of privacy but mostly people only give a shit up to a point... so it doesn't effect googles bottom line and therefore google also doesn't give a shit.
Really? I find Microsoft's documentation for Azure (in English) to be quite thorough and helpful. Their tools are well-designed and quite powerful.
Perhaps those of AWS and GCP are even more amazing, but I wouldn't call Azure "horrible" by any stretch of the imagination.
There’s something to it. Ideas and implementations are pressure tested through market competition, so they get refined and adapted.
The issue with advertising specifically is that it’s inherently manipulative and often condescending. On the web it has a infectious nature, making everything a bit worse.
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
> Banksy
Power is. Look at all the powerful dictators in the past, and what they did. Do you think Stalin was motivated by money? Napoleon? Mussolini?
Microsoft is evil v1. Google and everyone post 2000 is evil v2.
They are just as evil as Microsoft but they've learned that amongst other things, you need to a) seem nicer and b) lobby politicians.
I'd argue that made them more evil.
Though it has to be said that Microsoft has learned, too, so at this point they're pretty much the same thing.
It's the short sightedness that causes the most unethical behavior from the top down. 10-Qs... a man considered changing that timeline to help fix that problem but he was ostracized. Maybe one day la naranja will return.
I would be interested to see what an ethics motive looks like that gets people out of the bed in the morning to do a job they barely care about.
Don't forget security! Multiple serious and extremely trivial cross-tenant security exploits only in the past couple of years. AWS and GCP have had none ever, the much smaller OCI has had one.
Microsoft is the capitalist evil. Google is the technocratic AI evil. The first wants your money, as much of it as they can hoover, using dark patterns if useful for it. The second wants to optimize your life using _their_ metrics, without ever engaging with you (humanity is the problem - engaging with it never scales).
How about "malevolent?"
I have spent a significant amount of time on each and would suggest it's the only actual cloud. The others are data centers masquerading as a cloud, notice when us-east has issues for AWS, Azure had a spof dependency on a datacenter that didn't even have AZs... GCP is architecturally on another level. The others seem to be unaware of what 'cloud native' means, so if you are attempting cloud native on non clouds, you inherit their lack of foresight.