That's a rather funny claim coming from google, considering we are now back in the same situation as we were 20 year ago, when people were designing websites to work 'best' on microsoft's IE browser. Now a lot of things are being designed to work 'best' on Chrome.
At least Microsoft has the benefit of the institutional knowledge of having once been as dominant as Google is now.
More like it's been using its dominant browser market position, and "Essential" nature as a search/cloud based services operator, to wag the dog of the web standardization process.
Deliberately breaking the performance of YouTube on Firefox is fine, because it shows how the non neutral net degrades into a television show with lots of commercial breaks. No way to opt out while trying to do work on your personal computer using the information shared on our Internet. None of that, if it's up to Microsoft and Google.
- break compability or make their sites slow in other browsers, sometimes in so interesting ways that it makes it hard to defend as just incompetence. Edit, example: didn't they go out of their way to find a way to make YouTube crawl in Firefox while performing well in Chrome a few months ago? IIRC instead of doing it the new straightforward way that was supported everywhere they went with a solution that was so backwards that it was already deprecated in Chrome as well or something?
- make banners on the front page of the worlds most famous web property, urging people to change
Now Stadia Studios might not seem like a big deal, I mean who uses it? Not many people bought into it because no one trusts Google to keep anything alive.
Consequently, Google Cloud is great but I know that without question we picked AWS and Azure because of appearances of Google publically killing and not supporting their products.
People at Google absolutely do stupid things and damage their reputation.
In the original version of the legislation, google and facebook were required to pay up each time they served an <a> tag that pointed news.com sites. That's what google meant by "breaking the open web" - having to pay <a href> tax.
This was all fine by Microsoft. They apparently did some deal with Murdock in 2019 so appear to have been behind this all along. It's all echos of Gates era dealings.
Chrome is tangential to the story, but Google calling Microsoft out for trying "to break the way the open web works" is super hypocritical. Its the pot calling the kettle black.
This is not true at all. The web is at a much better state than 20 years ago. There may be some thing going on that are not ideal, but the it's a night and day difference. I don't know why this gets so many upvotes.
It's in a better state because Chrome, at least, is actively developed, whereas IE was lagging behind.
But in many other respects, it's quite similar. A better baseline for comparison would be circa 2010, when Firefox was still popular enough, and "best viewed in Chrome" wasn't really a thing yet.
It can be really stupid too, I’ve had sites not load and suggest that I use “modern browsers like Chrome” when I’m trying to load it in Safari or Brave. So I think we’re back to dumdums literally checking user agent.
For a little while, outlook and 365 web didn’t work properly in safari because of the third party cookies defaults, so the suggestion was to use Chrome (rather than just adjusting cookie settings).
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Today I develop mostly on Chrome, but I don't dread testing for compatibility on Firefox or Safari. The standardization is quite good across vendors.
Add to that, back then Microsoft had no drive to move the web platform forward. IE was not getting better, which is why it was eventually eclipsed by Firefox and later Chrome.
I can't tell you how many times I have problems with a site in Firefox because they only designed it for chrome now, sites owned by google are the biggest offenders.
oddly enough, most of the time I hit issues with stuff not working on safari, but fine on firefox or chrome. I just had a bill pay request from someone using 'bill4time.com' service. Broke in safari, worked in chrome. I seem to hit these situation perhaps once a week or so, where moving to chrome or firefox generally 'fixes' it.
AWS is particularly bad with Safari. For some reason, AWS asserts that U2F doesn't work on Safari so I have been forced to remove 2fa from my account. Yay. And AWS Amplify never loads on Safari either.
Google has probably done more of this single handedly since the advent of Chrome than Microsoft has.
Not that I’m absolving MS of any wrongdoing either, but google has definitely been far more malicious, and for them to pretend otherwise is unscrupulous at best.
You must have missed the entire 90s. Microsoft hasn't changed, it's just got better PR. Google has it's faults as well, but I vastly prefer Google's contribution over Microsoft's.
I was an asshole to my parents in the 90s as an angsty teen. If my parents held on to the 90s like I could never change, grow or be something different my family would be torn apart.
The Microsoft of the 1990s was a crew of unethical adults led by unethical adults who systematically committed unethical acts. The Microsoft of the 2020s is composed of employees that while obviously not fully contiguous with the crew of the 20 not 30 years ago was replaced piece by piece by people that were trained by said unethical people or trained by the people who were in turned trained by same.
Companies have a character and a culture that is retained which is why we often speak of them as contiguous entities because like the ship of theseus is an referant to a entity with a certain history and characteristics so to is a company.
An ill chosen analogy merely doesn't highlight the characteristics that are alike. Yours seems to be chosen to deliberately highlight irrelevant characteristics in order to misdirect. I suggest you stick to talking about the facts.
When does it end? The next generation in 20 years will be taught by the current ones who have the negative teachings of their prior. It will never end.
It doesn't need to end. I could point out organizations that have retained substantial elements of their nature over hundreds and thousands of years even while undergoing substantial evolution in many ways.
Unfortunately a lot.
I was one of them, loved the Android idea.
Then a couple of years ago I started migrating to privacy oriented services (or at least alternatives), but it's a long process.
Like might be too strong a word. I sometimes grudgingly use Google for search because DuckDuckGo - unfortunately, frustratingly, bizarrely - doesn't know what operands are.
> In the middle of all of this, Microsoft was very public about its support of Australia’s new law, and it even teamed up with European publishers to call for online platforms to reach deals to pay news outlets for content. Google isn’t happy about Microsoft getting involved and this is the first big public spat we’ve seen since the Scroogled era.
Microsoft acted pretty sleazy (IMHO) on the Australian law situation but it's rich for Google to attack them since they caved first and paid. I'm all for taxing companies (tech or otherwise) in sensible ways but the Australian news law was far from sensible.
I'm disappointed they caved in and paid the danegeld, but the way Microsoft went "We fully support the extraction from the danegeld, and if Google happens to lose any market share due to its refusal to pay it, we would be more than happy to have these customers use Bing instead. We fully support this law that has no effect on us and actively harms our main competitor" is just disgusting.
They would be fine with it as long as they aren't subject to it. If they were subject to it, it would make it very difficult to operate Bing. Unless they just aren't doing algorithm changes very often, it would present a significant burden to be required to report out such changes weeks before deployment. Of course the forced "arbitration" for "fair" payment to news organizations would also be onerous for them. But fortunately for MS the law is highly selective in which companies it targets.
Google's move was clever because they were in a lose-lose situation where they had to pay anyways. By doing a deal with News Corp, they showed that the whole thing was a blackmail and will the Australian government look bad.
thats a fairy tail. mozilla killed ie for home users, but on the business side (a way bigger market) that was not true.
mozilla also basically did not target that market that much, I meaan they had no adm/admx templates and msi files for a very long time.
I stopped using Firefox because it was a bloated mess that frequently ended up with memory leaks despite shutting down the browser. Creating a new window with no history and killing all other windows still didn't get Firefox.exe to release all the ram it gobbled up.
Mozilla has a habit of taking a decent, slimmed down browser (Phoenix, for those who remember that era), adopting it as their primary because their previous became a bloated mess... then taking the new fork, making it unwieldy and forcing people to create yet another fork to reign it in.
Even though I disagree with that perspective, it has no bearing on the fact that Firefox had already dislodged IE from a dominant browser position before Chrome even appeared on the scene.
Correct. But I also switched because chrome was better. There was no abuse by Google that impacted my decision. It was Chrome's per tab process that created more stability and overall less bloat.
Chrome was better for me for about 15 min until it crippled uBlock origin - at the same moment Chrome took action against non-Google advertisers, that Google didn't like.
Meanwhile my memory issues with Ffx decreased while Chrome's grew; I've no memory issues to speak of at all now. Ultimately, FFx plugins wound up helping craft a positive browsing experience on Ffx, that can't really be duplicated in Chrome.
Now I use Chrome to open up a single, overseas website because their native translation really is the best. Firefox (95%), Opera, Brave even Edge all see more use, however.
True but I rely on them mostly for special use cases. For example, Google voice has recurring issues with several browsers but less so with Brave. It's also easier to spot the Brave icon on my taskbar than trying to figure out which FFx window has my Gmail/GV pages.
With a combination of some actually good improvements over Firefox, and incredibly shady bundling practices. There was hardly anything you could install a few years back without it forcing Chrome as a standard browser on you.
Chrome was beating Firefox way before any bundling because it was just so much faster at browsing the web.
Please don't rewrite history with things that aren't true - Chrome was significantly better browser for a long time with significantly better developer tools which made tech people prefer it early.
Firefox did hard hard work, all the way through the dark ages, it kept the flame alive. I've used firefox since the start, I still use firefox, in fact my progression was netscape->mozilla->firefox, and i'll continue using firefox.
But chrome did the impossible, they shifted the Moms and Pops and most unbelievable, the absolute holy grail, the corporate desktop.
Just looked it up and find it hard to believe how low firefox's share is, under 4% overall. I moved back to it about a year ago from chrome and I think it's great.
Mozilla killed Firefox. Several times, in fact. How many variants of regular and mobile Firefox have there been now because the primary version always ends up a bloated mess?
I'm thankful for that but now they've given us a new even worse monster and we are right back to square one.
Remember: IE6 was the best browser for a while, the problem was it did things slightly different and people targeted IE instead of the web, exactly as they target Chrome instead of the web today.
End result is the same. I care a lot about cross browser and the amount of aggravation I have to go to get the developers I work with these days to even look at a site in just safari and chrome, (Firefox is completely ignored) is absurd and the amount of backchat and sarcastic comments of “can’t we just tell them to use chrome” is ridiculous.
My career started in the IE 6 era and even then people tested in at least 2 browsers.
At most I’ve been lucky to have 1 team member who cares about this stuff. Maybe other companies are better but this is my experience the past 5 years or so.
Just curious, what is the best way to “target the web” these days? I remember back in the xhtml days that you could validate against standards. But as I understand it these days with google eating up the standards development it seems like html5 is synonomous with chrome.
Do test in Firefox (and Safari). If it works in FF it mostly works everywhere, but Safari has some quirks I think.
In fact as long as I test my code in Firefox I haven't been caught with something that didn't work in all browsers any of my customers supported the last 4 or so years.
Yes, they didn't care much for standards. But the larger problem was that they basically stopped implenting new web standards the moment IE was dominant, protecting their Windows monopoly.
I don't think many web developers who have really lived through the IE 'glory days' would say the current situation is even nearly as bad.
'slam' is such a weird verb for this sort of thing, and it only seems to turn up in headlines. It is supposed to be a wrestling metaphor? Its such an odd mental image.
It's slang from around the turn of the 20th century.
No joke, it comes from birdsong hobbyists, when two birds were "competing" they would insert deliberately off and loud notes to intimidate and silence each other. They named those "slams" like a door slam.
That became the slang for the patter of street hawkers when they negged you or heckled someone else for laughs and attention, and eventually became slang for any kind of insult or put down.
They wrote a commitment blog last year, then shortly after they re-did the entire AMP leadership board and with things gone quiet ever since - the GA4 not supporting analytics surely doesn't help.
Where are the institutions that are supposed to protect us from corruption that we pay dearly in taxes? This is just so wrong. Strong towards the weak, weak towards the strong...
Nobody ought to have to pay for linking to content it breaks how the internet works when you get to decide who can link to your content. Just because something would serve as a handle to allow one party to maximize their profit by controlling others behavior doesn't imply we should enshrine such a handle into law.
Why? Content creators are free to negotiate with google themselves. If they can't come up with a good deal they can use robots.txt to remove their content from google.
As long as Google only used links that was fine, but now with the Knowledge Graph often just quoting all the content of the site directly, and Google showing ads to profit from that, we're seeing a situation where Google profits by scraping content, but the creators never do.
None of this would've been an issue 20 years ago when 90% of the web was noncommercial, but now it destroys an entire industry.
If a better web experience is core to Google’s interests, paying for content should pay off in the long run. That's what they're demanding of content creators anyway, so they should put their money where there mouth is.
Negotiate with a company that bans accounts randomly and does not have a helpline?
Nah, let government go after them, I bet they will be taking _those_ phone calls.
Income taxes from two or more jurisdictions, as well as sales taxes and whatever cut the platform takes? What’s left, and is it even a positive number?
Don't forget that half of your money goes to random companies, because you've used 3 seconds of copyrighted music or something that vaguely resembles it. And that's if you got lucky and didn't got demonetized entirely
A few years ago someone's video of white noise got claimed, because white noise is apparently copyrighted too.
10 hours of Jason Turner's livestream got demonetized because literally 5 minutes of it was a bunch of random ads from the 80s
AMP was the defense against all content moving into native apps like Facebook. Antithesis of open web, with completely locked down content, applied DRM and no ability to contribute without the review of platform owners.
It's that the endgame you'd have preferred? Ecosystem of apps because news web developers refused to make their ad and autoplay video ridden websites usable on the mobile devices?
Look at the trends and tell me if you'd have preferred to read all your content in an Apple News walled garden instead?
Of course, they're a corporation. The question is - why did noone else step up and try to address the issue? Other corpos just wanted to silo all data into their proprietary platforms and opensource/openweb teams just pretended that the issue never existed.
> News organizations have ad inventory to sell, but they can no longer sell directly to those who want to place ads,” says Microsoft president Brad Smith. “Instead, for all practical purposes they must use Google’s tools, operate on Google’s ad exchanges, contribute data to Google’s operations, and pay Google money. All this impacts the ability of news organizations to benefit economically even from advertising on their own sites.”
I’m not too versed in the Australia news thing, but is this statement true?
Google, the company that actively tries to make YouTube not work on any Amazon device simple because Amazon is a competitor, is complaining about someone breaking the open web? Google refused to build an app for Amazon devices and even when Amazon had a working app that was essentially a browser that visited YouTube on their Alexa devices with screens, YouTube changed their website for the sole purpose of breaking it on Amazon devices. Google has no right to complain here.
IIRC, Amazon built their own UI around YouTube which meant YouTube was not monetizing those views.
Edit:
> A person familiar with Google's thinking on the matter told Engadget that a big point of contention had been the fact that Amazon implemented what was essentially a hacked version of YouTube on both the Echo Show and Fire TV. Rather than work with Google to build versions of its apps that work on Amazon's devices, Amazon has been trying to do it itself -- a move that cuts out features and also likely affects Google's ability to collect on some of the ad revenue that comes from its videos.
The update at the bottom details amazons side of the story:
Amazon has responded, and its response points to the unfair nature of Google effectively blocking access to the YouTube web site based on the type of device being used to access it. "Echo Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube's existing website," Amazon's statement reads. "Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website. We hope to resolve this with Google as soon as possible."
> Amazon isn’t without fault either. The company dragged its feet for years in releasing a proper Prime Video app for Android in the Google Play Store. Previously, you had to install Amazon’s own, separate app store and only then could you install Prime Video. It was a sad, convoluted attempt at luring users to the Amazon Appstore. Even now, Prime Video still doesn’t support Chromecast.
> And that’s directly tied to Chromecast’s absence on Amazon.com. Since there’s no easy way of watching Prime Video, Amazon won’t sell it. But it’s Amazon’s own fault that Prime Video doesn’t work with Chromecast. Amazon has the power to make it happen. What’s Google supposed to do in this scenario?
> Amazon’s decision to remove popular, well-liked products from its store over this spat — or never sell them to begin with — is an ugly example of the company throwing its weight and power around. No one should be surprised that Google is crying foul. Is the company under any obligation to sell Google Home — the chief rival to its own Echo? Of course not. Them’s the breaks. But the Chromecast situation is troubling, and Amazon’s recent halting of sales for certain Nest hardware (with no real explanation) seems juvenile. Prime shipping is still a very powerful incentive, and Amazon is well aware of that.
I use Chromecast with Prime. Mine's from 2016 so I don't know if they stopped supporting it on newer models.
Everything else though, I agree with. Big tech, like any monopoly, does not play fair.
Changing the chromecast — at the time advertised as an "open" streaming standard — to lock competitors out was the first shot. It definitely started with Google.
If I recall correctly, Google changed the Chromecast protocols repeatedly to disable the Fire stick's implementation because the Fire was wrapping direct video links (e.g. removing all the official YouTube UI/features) and stripping ad plays.
The protocol only transmits links to an html page that will be used as a player interface (and can load ads, etc) and a direct video link.
That player interface page was very device specific (e.g. the current youtube page doesn't even work on Gen1 chromecasts with 50-60Hz videos), so Amazon couldn't use those, and only supported the direct links.
Which is not that unusual — youtube could just serve a dash manifest link that directly concatenates ad and video, or build their player page better.
Google actually did it to lock people in to their Chromecast implementation (a lot of third party implementations showed up in the early days), especially for fear of DRM being broken.
We could have had an entire open ecosystem with a single standard replacing mpd, sonos etc working with everything, were it not for those actions Google took (so as a consumer and open source dev, I'm naturally pissed).
It still doesn't really work. When I load YouTube in Firefox it kind of hangs for a while and then plays in low res. If I grab the URL and jump over to Chrome, it instantly play in the highest resolution.
That's strange, even with all my privacy and ad blocking addons, Youtube works perfectly fine in my Firefox configuration. Try a new Firefox profile and see if it still fails, I suppose; I suspect there's something wrong with your install.
The only issue I have with Firefox + Youtube is that there's a memory leak somewhere in my addon setup that causes Firefox to bloat, but I haven't bothered to figure out which addon causes that because the impact has diminished greatly since I've installed another 16GB of RAM for other reasons.
The media is institutionally biased against Google and Facebook because they are 'direct competitors' in their heads. Don't get me wrong, there are issues with Big Tech, but I don't believe the news industry's collapse to be one of them. It's like arguing with the printing press or railroads galvanizing the dinosaurs of their era.
Facebook is also the favorite most hated company on social media sites like Reddit, Hacker News. Imo there’s no logic behind the degree of disliking FB over some other big tech.
This entire thread is depression and responses like this are pure depression. Why does any of this matter? All I see are a bunch of apologists or a bunch of people making assumptions and no one really discussing anything without their extreme bias and prejudices in the way.
The first comments here are people bashing the Microsoft of 20 years ago..
And this one... "The Verge sounds very Pro-Microsoft" - for no other reason than to perpetuate the bias here.
Why do we do this to ourselves people? This is absurd.
The Verge is very much in love with Apple, they're not in love with Google. That doesn't make them Pro-Microsoft. The verge DID hire a a fantastic Microsoft writer who knows Microsoft inside and out, so they're not Oblivious to Microsoft - but that doesn't make them "Pro Microsoft".
And for Christ's sake - NONE of what is mentioned here makes Microsoft bad. They're a business making products and building services doing what businesses do and its certainly not Balmer's Microsoft anymore.
Who cares what Google isn't happy with when its painfully apparent no one is is happy with anything around here...
Some pretend Microsoft has turned into this benevolent corporation lately with their "Microsoft <heart> Linux" and adopting Android and Chrome. Well all those were done because they'd lost market share in servers, mobile OS and desktop browsers despite being the dominant player and forcing their offerings the whole time.
Microsoft used to run smear campaigns (remember Scroogled?) when they hired Hillary Clinton's strategist. This last case shows they don't even care if it means everyone can be sued for not paying for a hyperlink. Say whatever you want about AMP or Google reader or whatnot but when was the last time Google spent their money on smear campaign and negative ads on a rival?
Microsoft's corporate tactics have remained the same.
Agreed! I used to work for a Microsoft owned game studio a while back, and during their Microsoft <3 Linux campaign, or shortly after, I noticed that xbox.com wouldn't work on Linux, unless I changed the user-agent to Chrome-windows or Chrome-Macos
Loves Linux but blocks Linux by user agent. Nice.
They changed it tho when we contacted them, so I guess there is some love, at least they were willing to change (when it impeded their own developers).
Microsoft loves Linux in a very specific context—on servers, and as a development environment, in the latter case preferably running as a container or virtual machine inside of... well, you know.
Similarly, if you want to directly download the Windows 10 ISO on a Windows machine you need to fake the user agent. In which case the site always claims that you're running an old version of Windows, even if you actually loaded the site on Linux.
?! sso means no relogin between multiple applications/platforms which works since day 1 on mac and linux. what does not work is seamless sso over the os (logon+browser+logged into office 365), but even that works with a good configured kerberos, but it's wonky and not supported. (only hybrid tough)
I believe you misread the comment, gp isn't saying that Linux doesn't support SSO but rather MS's website doesn't offer that when accessing from Linux unlike when they are using Windows.
Most people seem upset that they said / did mean things to competitors or bundled IE with Windows. Meanwhile the FAAG (facebook, amazon, apple, google) is being investigated for antitrust not in the distant past, but right now.
Some people are too young to remember. I recently worked with new grads in a startup, and for these 20-somethings Microsoft has always been somewhat cool, and Bill Gates has always been this benevolent old guy that cures diseases. They were very surprised where I shared the articles where they were saying literally LINUX IS CANCER.
With a mixture of time passing and billions of dollars, it looks like they've successfully "cleaned" their image :(
High-end, (long-term) consistent PR management works very well. (Remember how everyone used to hate George W. Bush with the passion of a thousand burning suns?)
On a related note I'm 25 and am bitter about how older generations lived through Watergate / Iran-Contra / etc, and not only let everyone involved off the hook, but then let them all pull the strings behind the scenes throughout the 2000s and into the Trump era.
Including during the Obama era? That would be a ballsy statement. I might have misunderstood you though - I'm not a native English speaker. (And also, we are drifting off-topic.)
Don't confuse politicians with "everyone". To be honest, being an east coast transplant on the west coast, I was shocked that no one remembered Trump during the Clinton era, or when he was pulling real estate cons. Either way, this isn't the place for me to get into politics. I hope that isn't what this forum becomes.
P.S. Everyone is bitter about how the "older generation" handled things without the lens of modern values. I'm Gen X and we were angry all the time.
EDIT: phone changed east to easy. They are not equal.
I should clarify that I'm upset that they lived through it but still manage not to let that experience inform their votes today. Hindsight is 20/20, and now they have the benefit of hindsight!
It's not about PR, it's about some fundamental changes in their business goals. Azure allowed them to embrace Linux and open source in a way where they benefitted. Also they are no longer ran by that shithead Steve Ballmer. Microsoft isn't perfect but as far as massive corporations go they're no where near that bad.
I've learned from experience: There is no way on HN to successfully comment negatively on something like that. Good luck with whatever you are doing with the the Microsoft platform.
I try not to complain when proper competition causes improved behavior.
I’m a fan of “the new MS”. Do I trust them? Not any more than a massive company.
But do I love all the open source software they’re producing now? Yes! Do I pretend that it’s because MS has seen the light and become penitent? No!
But at least this time when MS turns its back on their users, we can fork .net, edge, and vscode and go on with our lives. MS can’t unmerge their contributions to the Linux kernel or other open source projects they’re selfishly contributing to.
Pretty much every large company will play nasty when it suits them and if they think they can get away with it. That’s why they call it “corporate warfare”, not “corporate hugs and kisses”.
I never found much sense in this line of reasoning. MS as a corporation is an abstract legal concept with a name. Every action taken under this "umbrella" is an executive's decision (or a group's), not the actual abstract corporation doing it.
It's fair to assume most of the leadership from '90s MS has moved on. So is your concern with the current leadership or the abstract concept of the corporation? Is it that "they did it once so they might do it again" the real worry? Do we assume the corporation has hysteresis and the executives of today will take similar actions to those of the past because of operating under the same "umbrella" named MS? If so how far back do you go with this record of bad or good deeds?
I see a lot of people sort of bragging with being old enough to remember evil '90s MS (so around 35+). How far back do you look at a company to judge them? I can think of a lot of companies who flip-flopped several times because the leadership changed and the market demanded it. So once they go bad do they stay forever bad?
Your worry should be MS's current leadership and their ability to execute in the future, not what Gates did 20 years ago. Similarly you don't judge today's Google by their actions of 20 years ago. Saying "I don't trust MS because Gates in the '90s" tells me you might be stuck on the actual name and that's the only aspect that will ever matter to you (a simple "if MS then Bad").
You've seen Google go from do no evil to whatever they are now. Apple from whatever they were to champions of user privacy. MS from whatever they were to embracing open source and such. None of it because corporations are sentient beings with intentions but because of leadership and market imposed necessity. If anything you (and I) are more rsponsible for what MS, Google, Apple, etc. do than those companies themselves. They do what we allow them and what we reward simply because their leadership acts in the interest of profits.
My interpretation of "Microsoft <3 Open Source" is that MS has realized that their power in the tech industry is not dependent on their source code being a secret, and that in fact making your stuff open source makes you more popular and influential.
In my opinion, MS didn't really cede much power to the community when open-sourcing .NET, for example. It would still be incredibly painful for a company to unhook itself from Microsoft's version of .NET, and .NET is still influential for all the same reasons is was before, because of MS's position in the software industry. I think the move was just MS moving the framework into the current paradigm of software development. All(?) popular frameworks are open source these days: React, Electron, ... It just doesn't fit with the times to have .NET be closed source.
It think is interesting to think though about Google directly providing the source code base for its competitors, Edge and the other Chromium clones. Maybe the lasting message of US v. Microsoft was that if you open-source your software, you're less likely to be perceived as controlling. Or maybe your software simply becomes more influential if it's open source! Chrome being open source allows Google to be enormously influential as far as web standards go. It would probably be a lot less so if Chrome was closed source.
Microsoft simply realized what current Open Source really is -> free labor. People will willingly work for free in their own free time using their own hardware on projects of other people or corporations. And they are proud to do that!
Anyone not taking advantage of that must have brain damage.
Original ideas of open source (free as in speech) are long forgotten.
> MS has realized that their power in the tech industry is not dependent on their source code being a secret, and that in fact making your stuff open source makes you more popular and influential.
It has been a huge boon for .NET as well. Serious contributions started pouring in almost immediately. Code from Mono being ported over; linux support. Fixes to really old issues that were not getting attention because .NET was essentially put "in a box".
C#, .NET and the CLR are pretty great tech that could have been a true Java alternative if not for the fact the vision for it was so narrowly scoped to Windows.
It's not had time to stabilise. Many of the multi-platform features are still developing and there's some stuff in there that can trip you up if you're just reading the documentation.
A big problem I ran into recently is that the documentation for some methods indicate they can throw a "PlatformNotSupported" exception but don't link to anything that lists which platforms/versions actually support the method.
Some new features like single file executables will break existing code in subtle ways, a common method of getting the application directory was to use Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location, when running as a single file executable that returns an empty string.
I still think it's a big improvement over the older .NET Framework stuff that I'm mostly using, but I can see why it isn't so appealing to the Java crowd.
> MS has realized that [...] making your stuff open source makes you more popular and influential.
You've got to be kidding. Microsoft isn't about to open source Windows, Office, or any of its crown jewels. They are only opening the source for bits that aren't profit centers and where widespread use would benefit them. And it is a trap... Think Oracle Java. As soon as they see an opening, they'll close it back up and fragment the user base between the open source and proprietary versions.
No. Oracle opensourced features that was only available on paid version of Oracle Java like Java Flight Recorder. OTOH Oracle stopped distributing their own Oracle Java distribution for free.
Red Hat is the known company that opensourcing acquired company's products.
Lobbying is like the prisoner's dilemma. If you don't do it but your rival does then you'll end up with these extortion laws that hands Murdoch free money as we saw in Australia
That's totally fair, and I understand that Google isn't unique in that respect. My point is that just because Google isn't doing flashy ad campaigns doesn't mean that they're not surreptitiously doing everything they can to continue to establish and cement their position as an unavoidable toll-taker on the internet.
They provide much more value than what they capture, and what they capture is pretty much necessary to serve those services (in the search space, not Android etc). The only way to make them capture less value is by tax, as we have seen. Other big tech companies are much more rent-seeking and can actually unlock swaths of value with proper regulation.
Because there is no real difference between lobbying and bribing. And I think a lot of us have a problem with companies bribing politicians to get laws passed; especially companies that have enough money to bribe <the number of politicians needed to pass the law regardless of what anyone thinks about it> of them.
I question your premise that lobbying = bribery, but let’s let it stand unchallenged because it’s irrelevant here.
If Google, Apple and Microsoft are all competing with each other and also doing business with each other in different markets, and they’re also all lobbying legislators, whose metaphorical bag of money is the winner and gets all of their hopes and dreams fulfilled when Congress starts meddling?
What, the Americans working at Apple and Google and Microsoft and own stock in them suddenly aren’t citizens? What about the Board of Directors at each of them?
Legislative bodies is where politics is supposed to happen, and legislators don’t live in a vacuum. We don’t elect them and send them up to the top of an ivory tower for two years to philosophize about policy with the occasional edict sent down. So how do legislators know what kinds of policies people actually want when there’s about 700K people in their districts (and 39M constituents if you’re a California Senator) unless people show up and say, “Hey, this is what I want from you, this is why I elected you.”
You get a mixed bag because legislatures are a mixed bag representing a larger mixed bag, and sorry, newspaper polls aren’t a good stand in for showing up and putting your name down for consideration. Your interests as a citizen are not identical to the other 699,999ish of your neighbors, and the guy or gal representing you is just one person of a larger body.
1. What does the politician think is best for the people he represents
2. What the people he represents think is best for themselves
3. What is actually best for the people he represents
Whereas it appears to be
1. What will get the politician re-elect (party line + avoiding even addressing any topics that will upset their base)
2. What will make the politician the most money (lobbying/bribes)
It doesn't seem like "what's best for the people the politician represents" even comes into the discussion a lot of the time.
^ Bear in mind, I know there are good politicians. However, just like in the rest of life, it's the bad ones that _tend_ to succeed, the ones that don't care who they hurt.
You’re getting into inventing better people territory, politicians and constituents both.
And your 3-point list scares the crap out of me because while it might look fairly reasonable to you, it looks to me like you’re looking at the government for a source of paternalistic love, something it can never provide.
Congress isn’t in the business of doing what’s “best”, they’re in the business of politics, which involves a lot of talking, a lot of positioning, a lot of negotiating, and a lot of communication with their constituents (whether you’re paying attention or not, a disturbing trend recently has seen Congressmen downsizing or not investing in their policy shops in favor of investing more in their constituent services).
The people they’re going to be negotiating with are the ones that show up, not the ones making wishes on a falling star on the other side of the country while scrolling their phone till death do they part.
> And your 3-point list scares the crap out of me because while it might look fairly reasonable to you, it looks to me like you’re looking at the government for a source of paternalistic love, something it can never provide.
I was more talking about things like deciding what the right tax rate is. The people might want low taxes, but if those taxes can't support all the things those people need (roads, etc), then low taxes are not what those people need.
> Congress isn’t in the business of doing what’s “best”, they’re in the business of politics
And I see that as a problem. The point of government is to make life better for everyone being governed. Making life better just for the large companies that can pay for it is not the way government should work.
> I was more talking about things like deciding what the right tax rate is. The people might want low taxes, but if those taxes can't support all the things those people need (roads, etc), then low taxes are not what those people need.
If that’s all legislatures did, that would be nice. Unfortunately people can always invent a need where they perceive one.
> And I see that as a problem. The point of government is to make life better for everyone being governed. Making life better just for the large companies that can pay for it is not the way government should work.
Problem or not, you don’t have the “should” in charge, you have the “is”, so now you can only try to shape its scope: expand or contract governmental powers within a jurisdiction. That’s what it means to be a self-governing society, you don’t have to participate in the process, but if you don’t, you are intentionally limiting your own political power. If more people participate, they are also reducing your political power.
It’s not just large companies that participate either. Small businesses and constituents of all stripes do. If your participation begins and ends at the ballot box, that’s only a step up from a bystander because someone else is choosing who and what goes on those ballots you fill out. Whether you choose to treat your ballots as the tail end of your civic engagement or the face of it, that’s a personal choice, and I won’t tell you any choice you make is illegitimate, it just is whatever you choose to do.
It sounds like you're saying that we cannot change the way things work and that it's not even worth discussing how we think it could be better. I would say that is patently false (the statement that we cannot change things) and downright horrifying (the statement that we should not even discuss how it could be better). We should always be looking for ways to make our government (and civil employees) perform their roles (both by limiting the bad actions and facilitating the good).
1. Recognize human nature.
2. Plan for human nature; both mitigate it and incorporate it where possible.
3. Expect people to eventually break whatever you come up with because they’re people.
4. Take part in that system; don’t expect others to think of you on your behalf.
Legislatures and governments are made up of people, and any system which doesn’t recognize this is doomed to failure. You go through life doing what is best for yourself, your family, your community, why should you expect any different from people with more (or less) power than you? Why should they care about you if you’re not even there asking them to care about the things you care about?
> Why should they care about you if you’re not even there asking them to care about the things you care about?
Because they were elected to their position specifically to do what's best for everyone they represent. That is, quite literally, their job.
And yes, I care more about me and my own than I do for others. But I do care for others. Plus, caring for my own means I need to care for others because society as a whole must survive and be better tomorrow than it is today if I want the best for my own in the future.
All that being said, we do create laws to make sure people act in the best interest of "people", not "person", and that includes limits on what lawmakers and those that interact with lawmakers can do. They are part of that mitigation you spoke of. We can change how humans behave, counter to their human nature, via those laws and their enforcement.
In what way do you see Alphabet getting raked over the coals? They obviously are a monopoly in both search and in the Android app market and should be broken up according to antitrust law. That isn't even being considered.
How is calling the CEO to come testify before Congress so members of the House and Senate can score talking points not taking a company over the coals? Or passing disturbing crony-handout legislation like the Australian Parliament did to the clear detriment of specific companies?
Or all the nonsense going on in the EU? Or the political discussions to do as you suggest, breakup Alphabet, by people with the power, though not the moral standing, to do so?
> Or passing disturbing crony-handout legislation like the Australian Parliament did to the clear detriment of specific companies?
Or all the nonsense going on in the EU? Or the political discussions to do as you suggest, breakup Alphabet, by people with the power, though not the moral standing, to do so?
The bulk of Microsoft's income is not from hoarding user data and serving ads. Microsoft makes most of it's money by making good products that people pay for.
I've got my eye on them, but they aren't the same company under Satya.
What good products are they making? Haven't used any of their products in ages but I still get the impression that no one really enjoys their products (excluding excel maybe?)
Xbox, Azure, Office365 and Hotmail, C# are all good as far as I know. I've heard Bing search is good in some areas (supposedly it's actually made to be the best at searching for adult content…)
I'm surprised at some of their products that don't get enough criticism. Like Windows is still bad of course, you can't expect anything out of a PC with any 3rd party system software on it, but also Bing Maps is worse than Apple Maps, and nobody complains because nobody uses it.
That list mostly strengthens my impressions tbh. Aside from Xbox, can't say I know any person that is really excited by any of those products.
I am surprised that MS seems to fly under the anti-trust radar nowadays and I wonder how much tax payer money goes into MS pockets via government contracts.
Most big tech companies have been investing to diversify their income sources. Whether those investments have had a massive return to take over their original cash cow is a separate concern. Google has been investing in hardware and cloud, Apple in building online services, Amazon in pretty much everything.
Does Duck Duck Go not still run smear campaigns against Google? Their sites in my opinion are exaggerated to the point of being close to misinformation. At least misleading to the lay person. Yet Duck Duck Go is beloved far more than Microsoft.
I’m not a huge fan of the new rules, but it’s clear that they’ve scared Google to the point where their PR department is unable to moderate themselves anymore, a trend I’ve noticed with every large tech company when placed in a difficult position. Until you see more companies doing this I think it’s mostly safe to assume that any regulations you’re applying to them are toothless and just a cost of doing business.
wow it's hard to believe that's official google messaging. It looks like someone lost their cool and hit 'submit' without giving it a day and re-reading it.
Agreed. The following is particularly cringeworthy:
>"And it’s no coincidence that Microsoft’s newfound interest in attacking us comes on the heels of the SolarWinds attack and at a moment when they’ve allowed tens of thousands of their customers — including government agencies in the U.S., NATO allies, banks, nonprofits, telecommunications providers, public utilities, police, fire and rescue units, hospitals and, presumably, news organizations — to be actively hacked via major Microsoft vulnerabilities."
What does the Solar Winds hack have to do with news publishing regulation? Mentioning Bing here would have been logical but this poorly written run-on sentence is just pure mud slinging of the same type he is accusing MS of. Are there no corporate PR officers at Google who need to approve such posts prior to publishing? What an embarrassment.
Could also be Google adopting the new political speech. This is exactly how political "journalists" "slam" politicians on the other side. It's worked well for politicians this long, maybe it will work for these large walled corps?
That is in such astonishing bad faith. It's one thing when random Reddit commenters ignore that Microsoft is a massive corporation that can, in fact, mulitask. A senior Google official should know better, because Google can mulitask too. Just a spectacular display of engaging in ad hominem instead of engaging on the issue.
248 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadAt least Microsoft has the benefit of the institutional knowledge of having once been as dominant as Google is now.
Google are just as bad as MS. End of story.
- break compability or make their sites slow in other browsers, sometimes in so interesting ways that it makes it hard to defend as just incompetence. Edit, example: didn't they go out of their way to find a way to make YouTube crawl in Firefox while performing well in Chrome a few months ago? IIRC instead of doing it the new straightforward way that was supported everywhere they went with a solution that was so backwards that it was already deprecated in Chrome as well or something?
- make banners on the front page of the worlds most famous web property, urging people to change
This is quite ironic given all the "Google killed Microsoft's own browser engine" stories.
Google is much better at working than Microsoft.
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-exec-says-google-slowed-yo...
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
> make banners on the front page of the worlds most famous web property
Well, can't argue with that!
I do not think so.
But the ratio of these times vary per person.
Now Stadia Studios might not seem like a big deal, I mean who uses it? Not many people bought into it because no one trusts Google to keep anything alive.
Consequently, Google Cloud is great but I know that without question we picked AWS and Azure because of appearances of Google publically killing and not supporting their products.
People at Google absolutely do stupid things and damage their reputation.
In the original version of the legislation, google and facebook were required to pay up each time they served an <a> tag that pointed news.com sites. That's what google meant by "breaking the open web" - having to pay <a href> tax.
This was all fine by Microsoft. They apparently did some deal with Murdock in 2019 so appear to have been behind this all along. It's all echos of Gates era dealings.
But in many other respects, it's quite similar. A better baseline for comparison would be circa 2010, when Firefox was still popular enough, and "best viewed in Chrome" wasn't really a thing yet.
For a little while, outlook and 365 web didn’t work properly in safari because of the third party cookies defaults, so the suggestion was to use Chrome (rather than just adjusting cookie settings).
Add to that, back then Microsoft had no drive to move the web platform forward. IE was not getting better, which is why it was eventually eclipsed by Firefox and later Chrome.
Google has probably done more of this single handedly since the advent of Chrome than Microsoft has.
Not that I’m absolving MS of any wrongdoing either, but google has definitely been far more malicious, and for them to pretend otherwise is unscrupulous at best.
I was an asshole to my parents in the 90s as an angsty teen. If my parents held on to the 90s like I could never change, grow or be something different my family would be torn apart.
Perhaps you just need to grow up yourself.
Companies have a character and a culture that is retained which is why we often speak of them as contiguous entities because like the ship of theseus is an referant to a entity with a certain history and characteristics so to is a company.
An ill chosen analogy merely doesn't highlight the characteristics that are alike. Yours seems to be chosen to deliberately highlight irrelevant characteristics in order to misdirect. I suggest you stick to talking about the facts.
I suggest you realize that "facts" (behaviors) are contextual and like people, companies change.
I do however, think that google, having more reach and influence makes them somewhat worse.
We're not sampling chocolate here - think how propping up old media with mandatory charges actually helps us and the open web?
Will they? Of course not.
America asleep -> upvote to 3
America (or Google) wakes up -> downvotes to -2.
Fuck this politik and fuck Google. Amp is just internet cancer.
Not to mention AMP and whatnot.
For those out of the loop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqj2z3QaRyU
I'm disappointed they caved in and paid the danegeld, but the way Microsoft went "We fully support the extraction from the danegeld, and if Google happens to lose any market share due to its refusal to pay it, we would be more than happy to have these customers use Bing instead. We fully support this law that has no effect on us and actively harms our main competitor" is just disgusting.
Mozilla has a habit of taking a decent, slimmed down browser (Phoenix, for those who remember that era), adopting it as their primary because their previous became a bloated mess... then taking the new fork, making it unwieldy and forcing people to create yet another fork to reign it in.
Tell me again how this is Google's fault.
They simply made a better browser.
Chrome was better for me for about 15 min until it crippled uBlock origin - at the same moment Chrome took action against non-Google advertisers, that Google didn't like.
Meanwhile my memory issues with Ffx decreased while Chrome's grew; I've no memory issues to speak of at all now. Ultimately, FFx plugins wound up helping craft a positive browsing experience on Ffx, that can't really be duplicated in Chrome.
Now I use Chrome to open up a single, overseas website because their native translation really is the best. Firefox (95%), Opera, Brave even Edge all see more use, however.
Please don't rewrite history with things that aren't true - Chrome was significantly better browser for a long time with significantly better developer tools which made tech people prefer it early.
But chrome did the impossible, they shifted the Moms and Pops and most unbelievable, the absolute holy grail, the corporate desktop.
Remember: IE6 was the best browser for a while, the problem was it did things slightly different and people targeted IE instead of the web, exactly as they target Chrome instead of the web today.
IE6 was a broken implementation of the standards of the time.
And Microsoft decided that web browsing was done and did not update their browser.
It was a scheme for vendor lock-in.
My career started in the IE 6 era and even then people tested in at least 2 browsers.
At most I’ve been lucky to have 1 team member who cares about this stuff. Maybe other companies are better but this is my experience the past 5 years or so.
Do test in Firefox (and Safari). If it works in FF it mostly works everywhere, but Safari has some quirks I think.
In fact as long as I test my code in Firefox I haven't been caught with something that didn't work in all browsers any of my customers supported the last 4 or so years.
There are a few Chrome-specific things one shpuld
I don't think many web developers who have really lived through the IE 'glory days' would say the current situation is even nearly as bad.
No joke, it comes from birdsong hobbyists, when two birds were "competing" they would insert deliberately off and loud notes to intimidate and silence each other. They named those "slams" like a door slam.
That became the slang for the patter of street hawkers when they negged you or heckled someone else for laughs and attention, and eventually became slang for any kind of insult or put down.
I have a feeling AMP is really dead and now they're looking for ways to get news back after forcing so many people to embrace that terrible tech.
I filed a bug and nothing much has happened...
https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/24621
It appears that the current excuse is GA4 isn't ready for primetime? makes no sense...
None of this would've been an issue 20 years ago when 90% of the web was noncommercial, but now it destroys an entire industry.
If they are never going to get the traffic anyway, why be listed?
Interesting.
https://twitter.com/YouTubeCreators/status/13693446469089361...
A few years ago someone's video of white noise got claimed, because white noise is apparently copyrighted too.
10 hours of Jason Turner's livestream got demonetized because literally 5 minutes of it was a bunch of random ads from the 80s
It's that the endgame you'd have preferred? Ecosystem of apps because news web developers refused to make their ad and autoplay video ridden websites usable on the mobile devices?
Look at the trends and tell me if you'd have preferred to read all your content in an Apple News walled garden instead?
Google: We will defend you but we'll also strangle you while at it.
I’m not too versed in the Australia news thing, but is this statement true?
Edit:
> A person familiar with Google's thinking on the matter told Engadget that a big point of contention had been the fact that Amazon implemented what was essentially a hacked version of YouTube on both the Echo Show and Fire TV. Rather than work with Google to build versions of its apps that work on Amazon's devices, Amazon has been trying to do it itself -- a move that cuts out features and also likely affects Google's ability to collect on some of the ad revenue that comes from its videos.
https://www.engadget.com/2017-12-05-google-blocking-youtube-...
Amazon has responded, and its response points to the unfair nature of Google effectively blocking access to the YouTube web site based on the type of device being used to access it. "Echo Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube's existing website," Amazon's statement reads. "Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website. We hope to resolve this with Google as soon as possible."
> And that’s directly tied to Chromecast’s absence on Amazon.com. Since there’s no easy way of watching Prime Video, Amazon won’t sell it. But it’s Amazon’s own fault that Prime Video doesn’t work with Chromecast. Amazon has the power to make it happen. What’s Google supposed to do in this scenario?
> Amazon’s decision to remove popular, well-liked products from its store over this spat — or never sell them to begin with — is an ugly example of the company throwing its weight and power around. No one should be surprised that Google is crying foul. Is the company under any obligation to sell Google Home — the chief rival to its own Echo? Of course not. Them’s the breaks. But the Chromecast situation is troubling, and Amazon’s recent halting of sales for certain Nest hardware (with no real explanation) seems juvenile. Prime shipping is still a very powerful incentive, and Amazon is well aware of that.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16738752/google-youtube-a...
Amazon is nowhere near innocent in their feud
Amazon built the Fire stick to be compatible with Chromecast. Google then changed the Chromecast protocols repeatedly to prevent this.
Only after that did Amazon ban the Chromecast devices from their store.
Tell the whole story, at least.
That player interface page was very device specific (e.g. the current youtube page doesn't even work on Gen1 chromecasts with 50-60Hz videos), so Amazon couldn't use those, and only supported the direct links.
Which is not that unusual — youtube could just serve a dash manifest link that directly concatenates ad and video, or build their player page better.
Google actually did it to lock people in to their Chromecast implementation (a lot of third party implementations showed up in the early days), especially for fear of DRM being broken.
We could have had an entire open ecosystem with a single standard replacing mpd, sonos etc working with everything, were it not for those actions Google took (so as a consumer and open source dev, I'm naturally pissed).
I don't believe this is true. Do you have a source?
The only issue I have with Firefox + Youtube is that there's a memory leak somewhere in my addon setup that causes Firefox to bloat, but I haven't bothered to figure out which addon causes that because the impact has diminished greatly since I've installed another 16GB of RAM for other reasons.
They used the same techniques for Stadia, they bashed it while praising Xbox Cloud
The same with Team vs Zoom
And the same with AWS/GCE vs Azure
Hmm
The first comments here are people bashing the Microsoft of 20 years ago..
And this one... "The Verge sounds very Pro-Microsoft" - for no other reason than to perpetuate the bias here.
Why do we do this to ourselves people? This is absurd.
The Verge is very much in love with Apple, they're not in love with Google. That doesn't make them Pro-Microsoft. The verge DID hire a a fantastic Microsoft writer who knows Microsoft inside and out, so they're not Oblivious to Microsoft - but that doesn't make them "Pro Microsoft".
And for Christ's sake - NONE of what is mentioned here makes Microsoft bad. They're a business making products and building services doing what businesses do and its certainly not Balmer's Microsoft anymore.
Who cares what Google isn't happy with when its painfully apparent no one is is happy with anything around here...
Microsoft used to run smear campaigns (remember Scroogled?) when they hired Hillary Clinton's strategist. This last case shows they don't even care if it means everyone can be sued for not paying for a hyperlink. Say whatever you want about AMP or Google reader or whatnot but when was the last time Google spent their money on smear campaign and negative ads on a rival?
Microsoft's corporate tactics have remained the same.
Loves Linux but blocks Linux by user agent. Nice.
They changed it tho when we contacted them, so I guess there is some love, at least they were willing to change (when it impeded their own developers).
Don't trust Microsoft!
The fact that people might consider trusting ANY corporation is sad.
Reminds me of Office 365. If your UA has Windows in it, all of a sudden they offer SSO authentication as if Linux can't be set up for it.
Somehow, of all the abuses and injustices Big Tech commits, this one is way, way, way down on the very bottom of my list.
With a mixture of time passing and billions of dollars, it looks like they've successfully "cleaned" their image :(
P.S. Everyone is bitter about how the "older generation" handled things without the lens of modern values. I'm Gen X and we were angry all the time.
EDIT: phone changed east to easy. They are not equal.
I’m a fan of “the new MS”. Do I trust them? Not any more than a massive company.
But do I love all the open source software they’re producing now? Yes! Do I pretend that it’s because MS has seen the light and become penitent? No!
But at least this time when MS turns its back on their users, we can fork .net, edge, and vscode and go on with our lives. MS can’t unmerge their contributions to the Linux kernel or other open source projects they’re selfishly contributing to.
But they have shown that as a corporation they are comfortable playing nasty when it suits them.
It's fair to assume most of the leadership from '90s MS has moved on. So is your concern with the current leadership or the abstract concept of the corporation? Is it that "they did it once so they might do it again" the real worry? Do we assume the corporation has hysteresis and the executives of today will take similar actions to those of the past because of operating under the same "umbrella" named MS? If so how far back do you go with this record of bad or good deeds?
I see a lot of people sort of bragging with being old enough to remember evil '90s MS (so around 35+). How far back do you look at a company to judge them? I can think of a lot of companies who flip-flopped several times because the leadership changed and the market demanded it. So once they go bad do they stay forever bad?
Your worry should be MS's current leadership and their ability to execute in the future, not what Gates did 20 years ago. Similarly you don't judge today's Google by their actions of 20 years ago. Saying "I don't trust MS because Gates in the '90s" tells me you might be stuck on the actual name and that's the only aspect that will ever matter to you (a simple "if MS then Bad").
You've seen Google go from do no evil to whatever they are now. Apple from whatever they were to champions of user privacy. MS from whatever they were to embracing open source and such. None of it because corporations are sentient beings with intentions but because of leadership and market imposed necessity. If anything you (and I) are more rsponsible for what MS, Google, Apple, etc. do than those companies themselves. They do what we allow them and what we reward simply because their leadership acts in the interest of profits.
In my opinion, MS didn't really cede much power to the community when open-sourcing .NET, for example. It would still be incredibly painful for a company to unhook itself from Microsoft's version of .NET, and .NET is still influential for all the same reasons is was before, because of MS's position in the software industry. I think the move was just MS moving the framework into the current paradigm of software development. All(?) popular frameworks are open source these days: React, Electron, ... It just doesn't fit with the times to have .NET be closed source.
It think is interesting to think though about Google directly providing the source code base for its competitors, Edge and the other Chromium clones. Maybe the lasting message of US v. Microsoft was that if you open-source your software, you're less likely to be perceived as controlling. Or maybe your software simply becomes more influential if it's open source! Chrome being open source allows Google to be enormously influential as far as web standards go. It would probably be a lot less so if Chrome was closed source.
Original ideas of open source (free as in speech) are long forgotten.
It has been a huge boon for .NET as well. Serious contributions started pouring in almost immediately. Code from Mono being ported over; linux support. Fixes to really old issues that were not getting attention because .NET was essentially put "in a box".
C#, .NET and the CLR are pretty great tech that could have been a true Java alternative if not for the fact the vision for it was so narrowly scoped to Windows.
A big problem I ran into recently is that the documentation for some methods indicate they can throw a "PlatformNotSupported" exception but don't link to anything that lists which platforms/versions actually support the method.
Some new features like single file executables will break existing code in subtle ways, a common method of getting the application directory was to use Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location, when running as a single file executable that returns an empty string.
I still think it's a big improvement over the older .NET Framework stuff that I'm mostly using, but I can see why it isn't so appealing to the Java crowd.
You've got to be kidding. Microsoft isn't about to open source Windows, Office, or any of its crown jewels. They are only opening the source for bits that aren't profit centers and where widespread use would benefit them. And it is a trap... Think Oracle Java. As soon as they see an opening, they'll close it back up and fragment the user base between the open source and proprietary versions.
Red Hat is the known company that opensourcing acquired company's products.
That's a PR stunt. You should be Actually Concerned about how much Alphabet is spending on lobbying.
Lobbying only gets your interests on the table; it doesn’t get you a seat at the table.
If Google, Apple and Microsoft are all competing with each other and also doing business with each other in different markets, and they’re also all lobbying legislators, whose metaphorical bag of money is the winner and gets all of their hopes and dreams fulfilled when Congress starts meddling?
Well, not the citizens of the country, which is kind of the point.
Legislative bodies is where politics is supposed to happen, and legislators don’t live in a vacuum. We don’t elect them and send them up to the top of an ivory tower for two years to philosophize about policy with the occasional edict sent down. So how do legislators know what kinds of policies people actually want when there’s about 700K people in their districts (and 39M constituents if you’re a California Senator) unless people show up and say, “Hey, this is what I want from you, this is why I elected you.”
You get a mixed bag because legislatures are a mixed bag representing a larger mixed bag, and sorry, newspaper polls aren’t a good stand in for showing up and putting your name down for consideration. Your interests as a citizen are not identical to the other 699,999ish of your neighbors, and the guy or gal representing you is just one person of a larger body.
1. What does the politician think is best for the people he represents
2. What the people he represents think is best for themselves
3. What is actually best for the people he represents
Whereas it appears to be
1. What will get the politician re-elect (party line + avoiding even addressing any topics that will upset their base)
2. What will make the politician the most money (lobbying/bribes)
It doesn't seem like "what's best for the people the politician represents" even comes into the discussion a lot of the time.
^ Bear in mind, I know there are good politicians. However, just like in the rest of life, it's the bad ones that _tend_ to succeed, the ones that don't care who they hurt.
And your 3-point list scares the crap out of me because while it might look fairly reasonable to you, it looks to me like you’re looking at the government for a source of paternalistic love, something it can never provide.
Congress isn’t in the business of doing what’s “best”, they’re in the business of politics, which involves a lot of talking, a lot of positioning, a lot of negotiating, and a lot of communication with their constituents (whether you’re paying attention or not, a disturbing trend recently has seen Congressmen downsizing or not investing in their policy shops in favor of investing more in their constituent services).
The people they’re going to be negotiating with are the ones that show up, not the ones making wishes on a falling star on the other side of the country while scrolling their phone till death do they part.
I was more talking about things like deciding what the right tax rate is. The people might want low taxes, but if those taxes can't support all the things those people need (roads, etc), then low taxes are not what those people need.
> Congress isn’t in the business of doing what’s “best”, they’re in the business of politics
And I see that as a problem. The point of government is to make life better for everyone being governed. Making life better just for the large companies that can pay for it is not the way government should work.
If that’s all legislatures did, that would be nice. Unfortunately people can always invent a need where they perceive one.
> And I see that as a problem. The point of government is to make life better for everyone being governed. Making life better just for the large companies that can pay for it is not the way government should work.
Problem or not, you don’t have the “should” in charge, you have the “is”, so now you can only try to shape its scope: expand or contract governmental powers within a jurisdiction. That’s what it means to be a self-governing society, you don’t have to participate in the process, but if you don’t, you are intentionally limiting your own political power. If more people participate, they are also reducing your political power.
It’s not just large companies that participate either. Small businesses and constituents of all stripes do. If your participation begins and ends at the ballot box, that’s only a step up from a bystander because someone else is choosing who and what goes on those ballots you fill out. Whether you choose to treat your ballots as the tail end of your civic engagement or the face of it, that’s a personal choice, and I won’t tell you any choice you make is illegitimate, it just is whatever you choose to do.
1. Recognize human nature. 2. Plan for human nature; both mitigate it and incorporate it where possible. 3. Expect people to eventually break whatever you come up with because they’re people. 4. Take part in that system; don’t expect others to think of you on your behalf.
Legislatures and governments are made up of people, and any system which doesn’t recognize this is doomed to failure. You go through life doing what is best for yourself, your family, your community, why should you expect any different from people with more (or less) power than you? Why should they care about you if you’re not even there asking them to care about the things you care about?
Because they were elected to their position specifically to do what's best for everyone they represent. That is, quite literally, their job.
And yes, I care more about me and my own than I do for others. But I do care for others. Plus, caring for my own means I need to care for others because society as a whole must survive and be better tomorrow than it is today if I want the best for my own in the future.
All that being said, we do create laws to make sure people act in the best interest of "people", not "person", and that includes limits on what lawmakers and those that interact with lawmakers can do. They are part of that mitigation you spoke of. We can change how humans behave, counter to their human nature, via those laws and their enforcement.
Or all the nonsense going on in the EU? Or the political discussions to do as you suggest, breakup Alphabet, by people with the power, though not the moral standing, to do so?
Could you provide links for this part?
> Or passing disturbing crony-handout legislation like the Australian Parliament did to the clear detriment of specific companies? Or all the nonsense going on in the EU? Or the political discussions to do as you suggest, breakup Alphabet, by people with the power, though not the moral standing, to do so?
It's vague and confusing.
I've got my eye on them, but they aren't the same company under Satya.
I daily drive Linux and don't own an Xbox, but I'm also not a hater. I like companies that build things.
I'm surprised at some of their products that don't get enough criticism. Like Windows is still bad of course, you can't expect anything out of a PC with any 3rd party system software on it, but also Bing Maps is worse than Apple Maps, and nobody complains because nobody uses it.
I am surprised that MS seems to fly under the anti-trust radar nowadays and I wonder how much tax payer money goes into MS pockets via government contracts.
Most big tech companies have been investing to diversify their income sources. Whether those investments have had a massive return to take over their original cash cow is a separate concern. Google has been investing in hardware and cloud, Apple in building online services, Amazon in pretty much everything.
Note: I am not anti Duck Duck Go.
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC
I’m not a huge fan of the new rules, but it’s clear that they’ve scared Google to the point where their PR department is unable to moderate themselves anymore, a trend I’ve noticed with every large tech company when placed in a difficult position. Until you see more companies doing this I think it’s mostly safe to assume that any regulations you’re applying to them are toothless and just a cost of doing business.
That's rich coming from Google.
>"And it’s no coincidence that Microsoft’s newfound interest in attacking us comes on the heels of the SolarWinds attack and at a moment when they’ve allowed tens of thousands of their customers — including government agencies in the U.S., NATO allies, banks, nonprofits, telecommunications providers, public utilities, police, fire and rescue units, hospitals and, presumably, news organizations — to be actively hacked via major Microsoft vulnerabilities."
What does the Solar Winds hack have to do with news publishing regulation? Mentioning Bing here would have been logical but this poorly written run-on sentence is just pure mud slinging of the same type he is accusing MS of. Are there no corporate PR officers at Google who need to approve such posts prior to publishing? What an embarrassment.
Or it could be just the old google. We are good and you are evil mentality.