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Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

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Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#171
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way was MS sinking under Ballmer? Maybe they were not exciting but they were super profitable every year. I think it's more about better PR. Not everything is golden at MS now either. I am working on creating a platform for our medical software on Windows 10 and it really makes me want to switch to Linux or iOS. Windows is a big mess of old and new code and attempts of sandboxing like iOS but only half-hearte…

Windows always been a pain to develop for. And every Windows version redundantly includes "a new api for everything" alongside all the horrible legacy stuff. But Microsoft's recent efforts on Linux & macOS, i.e. VSCode, has been surprisingly good. They do a lot of things, I think Typescript is run by MS as well. So that's something that positively changed under Nadella.

TypeScript came about in 2011, while Ballmer was CEO.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always found this phrase an oxymoron.

Where humans are involved, mistakes will happen. Trusting someone but verifying their work is a safe and sane pairing.

But the whole point of trusting is that you get to skip verifying. What's the difference between trusting and not trusting if you still have to put in the work of verification anyway?

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always found this phrase an oxymoron.

Don't trust, verify.

And how do you do that? E.g. how do you verify that Google deletes your data when you tell it to?

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always found this phrase an oxymoron.

Where humans are involved, mistakes will happen. Trusting someone but verifying their work is a safe and sane pairing.

How is verifying everything because you don't trust people not to make a mistake operationally different from verifying everything because you suspect bad faith? To the supposed trusted party, the result is the same: you not taking them at their word and instead checking whatever they do. Even if you're being honest about only verifying to avoid mistakes, you can never prove it.

This definition of "trust but verify" would be better reduced to "verify", since it essentially claims that trust is, if not impossible, not practically applicable in any situation.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is telemetry built into VS Code that you can turn off, but it is turned on by default. There is no way to know how they're using that data. Microsoft also collects data on Office365 platform and even local Office 2019 installs. I was trying was to make a tongue in cheek point, rather than specifically digging into exact methods of how they collect data. You may be right but it is besides the core issue we are d…

We don't do any training on your data. Telemetry is largely for feature use tracking (eg we should really do better around this component, everyone is using it). There is absolutely no ads overlap at all. Literally none. Disclosure: I work at Azure but not on VS Code

Is there any way we can verify this?

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#176
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. because I knew what happened (and was happening) with AWS What is this, specifically?

Now it is extremely profitable. Before it was extremely profitable, and it had no competition.

In terms of supporting Windows on the Cloud, I would bet on Microsoft out-competing AWS.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#177

Having read Nadella's book Hit Refresh as soon as it went on sale, Microsoft performance since then doesn't look surprising at all. Having listed what's wrong (with their product focus, company culture etc), and where they plan to head, its' almost like the book informs the reader where puck is going to be (from Satya's POV). It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other…

> It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way! You should be pro-neither. Microsoft used to be against FOSS because they thought it would make them more money; Microsoft is currently friendlier to FOSS because they think it will make them more money. Does that make them bad people? No because all businesses are that way, even the vaunted "don't be evil" Google.

Being pro/anti specific companies in a very binary way, like you point out, is a false path.

However, placing all companies in the same bucket is committing a similar mistake.

There is definitely a “gradient of morality” amongst companies, despite all of them doing things because they think it is what will make them the most money in the long run.

A company building products that end up aiding the carrying out of genocides, for instance, is clearly on a more extreme end of the spectrum than a company making money selling music streaming subscriptions.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Contextual recommendations are based on practices developed in thousands of high quality, open-source projects on GitHub each with high star ratings." Wait, what? Is there a way to opt out of that in GitHub? I don't want their AI to scan my code. Realistically, since most of my GH code is Common Lisp with few stars, I doubt it's looking anyway, but I'd like to make sure. I'm sure it's covered in their TOS, but as…

I disagree with the paren't sentiment but I think they raise an interesting point: is/should there be a license that says: you can read/use/modify {this} but you cannot use it as a training data for the AI. {this} can be code or text or an image or any other content.

Genuine curiosity... why have you put an apostrophe in "parent"?

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't do any training on your data. Telemetry is largely for feature use tracking (eg we should really do better around this component, everyone is using it). There is absolutely no ads overlap at all. Literally none. Disclosure: I work at Azure but not on VS Code

Is there any way we can verify this?

If you can't trust Microsoft employees saying it, then it's most likely you won't be able to trust anything short of running Wireshark to verify the outgoing data, no?
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