I'm triggered. Shut that shit down.
Microsoft Coffee
51–60 of 394 posts
Re: Microsoft Coffee
#52If this happened in 2021 someone would be in prison or fired at best. That said, this is a hilarious story and reminds me of the things people used to do in the early days of the internet in terms of trolling and such. Unfortunately, after groups like the GN*A and others successfully trolled the world several times, nation states figured it out and started trolling to actually control the narrative of the internet! A…
what a strange way to obfuscate that GNAA acronym!
Associ*tion
Re: Microsoft Coffee
#53It’s sad that a company can’t accept negative PR and show them that they do indeed support their employee’s actions. I think it has more to do with how all organizations want to feel professional instead of nerdy and fun.
I'm not sure what employee actions they're supposed to support. MS didn't get a chance to 'support' this, these guys did the thing on their own. If I'm MS I'm not sure I want to do a lot to "support" them after the fact as I really don't need groups of other employees stocking the shelves with fake products... Any prank that looks like it has someone else's name on it, or approval... but isn't approved is just always…
When you're employed by a corporation, to what degree are you an individual and to what degree are you an extension of that corporation?
Microsoft isn't a person or individual. For MS to support something...really means some hundreds of individuals inside MS support a thing and have coordinated to communicate that support to the other hundreds and BOOM, MS now supports a thing (or doesn't).
All of this is about permissions, ownership, and labeling. I'm inclined to think the corporate world has it all wrong.
MS supported this by virtue of MS employees doing it. MS was also schizophrenic about it and smited its left-hand for not properly filing a request in triplicate with the brain.
Re: Microsoft Coffee
#54It’s sad that a company can’t accept negative PR and show them that they do indeed support their employee’s actions. I think it has more to do with how all organizations want to feel professional instead of nerdy and fun.
It's hard for any company to support the actions of their employees once they go lone wolf and depart from the approvals and procedures the company has put in place. Even Bill wasn't happy with this and more importantly when it comes to April Fool's jokes, he wasn't laughing.
> The PR flacks, on their own, tried to clean up and bury the whole thing, out of fear that BillG might get really angry about it. (He never did. Nor did Legal. In the end, it was all a huge overreaction by PR.)
Not sure where you got "Even Bill wasn't happy with this"
Re: Microsoft Coffee
#55> Things were different back in 1996. … Microsoft had a reputation, deserved or not, as more of an imitator than an innovator. Perhaps not too different, apparently.
Does it? I hardly see any news about Microsoft in 'tech' press anymore.
These days if a company isn't growing faster than the population its garbage. It isn't enough to have a consistent value proposition that some X% of the population will spend on. This isn't a sustainable viewpoint so we pop the bubble periodically and start again. MS' os is better than it ever was, but its competitors more than caught up. They still define the data formats of business to some extent with office. And their IDE group is the best for the languages they support. Perhaps with the exception of clion. But that is kind of a stable boring story.
Re: Microsoft Coffee
#56Volkswagen would have benefited from reading this article> Bill Gate's comment that the prank makes Microsoft look stupid applies pretty well to the Voltswagen stunt.
Re: Microsoft Coffee
#57Microsoft PR probably got upset because back then they used prison labor to wrap software boxes: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisone...
Re: Microsoft Coffee
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would be a massive SEC violation at minimum. A prison sentence would not be surprising at all. The only reason they likely didn’t get it in 1995 even is that MS PR (the one this person derides as PR flacks) apparently successfully convinced the world that this wasn’t done by MS insiders.
How can a regular non-executive employee be guilty of a SEC violation, for something like this? If I'm a Tesla employee and I make a fake image about a future Tesla airplane, is that a SEC violation?
You are attempting to manipulate the stock price, likely for personal gain.
Re: Microsoft Coffee
#59Is there any reason to believe that this actually happened? Conveniently, it was published on April 1st. The story itself would be a great April Fools' prank. :)
SSL cert is very suspicious. It is by Google Trust Services LLC valid starting on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 02:07:46 GMT. Video was uploaded to YouTube on April first.
I would go with a fun joke.
Re: Microsoft Coffee
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard for any company to support the actions of their employees once they go lone wolf and depart from the approvals and procedures the company has put in place. Even Bill wasn't happy with this and more importantly when it comes to April Fool's jokes, he wasn't laughing.
> The PR flacks, on their own, tried to clean up and bury the whole thing, out of fear that BillG might get really angry about it. (He never did. Nor did Legal. In the end, it was all a huge overreaction by PR.) Not sure where you got "Even Bill wasn't happy with this"
I got it from...
> BillG said, in effect, that the prank was not in good taste, and that it made Microsoft look stupid rather than clever - especially as a catch-up to Sun Microsystems. We learned he was repeatedly calling the prank “in poor judgement” in meeting and internal memos.