As much as I'm genuinely excited and sincerely optimistic about the great work from their developer group (e.g., the open source announcements this week), I also feel that their "if you can't compete on product, slander" negative ad campaigns (e.g., scroogled) will continue to hold Microsoft back as a company and as a culture.
This engineer, for example, would never consider going back and working there again as long as their executives think that negativity is a good business policy. And ultimately, their employees can (and have) voted with their feet.
Fix that, though, and yes, Microsoft is very much capable of reinventing itself for a new era.
Edit: To clarify, I'm sure that there are some readers who agree with the particular points raised in these negative campaigns. Generally speaking, I don't, but that's not my point here.
What bothers me is when, rather than promoting the values of one's own product, companies try to (sometimes even hypocritically) find or invent flaws in the competition instead. Be humble and respectful of your competitors and customers alike, build the best product you can (better than the competition if possible), and win on merit. I truly believe the talented, hard-working engineers deserve that much.
The first headline on that page is about google being accused of "wiretapping in gmail scans". Didn't both companies knowingly participate in mass spying along side the government? As far as I'm concerned, neither company is trustworthy. Who cares what a virtual document says in this day and age.
>Microsoft asks for explicit permission for any information sharing in their OS and software.
I just don't believe it. I can't believe it. For one thing, we know they're helping the government spy on people. But that doesn't matter, because if I sat down with just about any randomly selected windows user, they would have no idea what the MS TOS says, or any TOS associated with MS. I've never been using a MS service and had a pop-up come up and explicitly tell me they're sending my info to x y x.
IMHO we should do away with TOS altogether and rather than individuals having to agree to all sorts of crap they don't understand, the corporations should have to follow a TOS written by some consortium of smart tech-minded people and not bought and sold congressmen and lawyers.
edit: and also, how does the MS TOS work when I access a MS based server and upload information to it? I'm assuming it comes down to what the service providers TOS says, but then doesn't every service running on a windows based server need to have you agree to both the windows TOS and their TOS before taking your information (even if you agree to one TOS within another TOS)? Serious question.
Well, I like having the option to say "no", even if most users don't know to do so.
> For one thing, we know they're helping the government spy on people.
The NSA used windows error reporting, which works by sending stack dumps to Microsoft.
The use of Windows Error Reporting is opt-in.
> ...the corporations should have to follow a TOS written by some consortium of smart tech-minded people and not bought and sold congressmen and lawyers ...
We should have better privacy laws that treat personal information as a valuable user-owned commodity that can't be aggregated and sold; the dangers inherent in a self-sufficient private surveillance apparatus are just too staggering:
- It is far too easily co-opted by the state, as evidenced by NSA revelations.
- The power and information asymmetry between individuals and corporations can easily grow to the point where fair trade is simply not viable. A hypothetical:
- Google knows the contents of your e-mails
- Google has cookies in your browser
- Google knows where you log in from
- Google notices that you (or your business) is planning
a trip.
- Google sells this information to the airlines
- The airlines adjust their rates based on the perceived likelihood
of your paying the higher or lower rate, based on insider knowledge
of your income and need.
This is hardly science fiction in a world where Target knows its customers are pregnant before their immediate family does.
Google (and others) are already tracking you around the web, reading your communications, hosting your corporate e-mail. Google Analytics is in everything.
"The power of individual targeting — the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them," says Eric Schmidt.
I find it hard to understand how you would be against Microsoft pointing out an obviously bad thing Google has done (in reference specifically to them altering the behavior of their shopping product). Since when is it a bad thing to highlight differences between your and competing products? In many cases your competition are the only ones with the resources to effectively alert your customers to such a change. This is market forces at work.
>I also feel that their "if you can't compete on product, slander" negative ad campaigns (e.g., scroogled) will continue to hold Microsoft back as a company and as a culture.
Well wouldn't the PC vs MAC ads be similarly slander? Apple got away with it, heck it even increased its sales, and for a long period of time, not only was it listed on Apple's website but it was also the general consensus that owning a MAC meant not worrying about viruses.
Despite most people (including me) disliking these slander commercials (especially political), they kept being made because they are effective and they work.
The "Get a Mac" campaign portrayed the PC as a lovable, if incompetent and comic, laughable even, character. You can feel sympathy for him. The "Gmail Man" portrays Google doing some frankly disgusting things.
>The "Get a Mac" campaign portrayed the PC as a lovable, if incompetent and comic, laughable even, character.
That is totally subjective. Some may have viewed him as "lovable" but others viewed him as "ignorant", "unclassy" and "filthy" similar to how someone could take the "Gmail Man" as "funny", "sarcastic" and simply "nosy".
This engineer, for example, would never consider going back and working there again as long as their executives think that negativity is a good business policy. And ultimately, their employees can (and have) voted with their feet.
Fix that, though, and yes, Microsoft is very much capable of reinventing itself for a new era.
Edit: To clarify, I'm sure that there are some readers who agree with the particular points raised in these negative campaigns. Generally speaking, I don't, but that's not my point here.
What bothers me is when, rather than promoting the values of one's own product, companies try to (sometimes even hypocritically) find or invent flaws in the competition instead. Be humble and respectful of your competitors and customers alike, build the best product you can (better than the competition if possible), and win on merit. I truly believe the talented, hard-working engineers deserve that much.