131–140 of 280 posts
If Google spun off their cloud division as an independent entity, I’d trust Google Cloud more than Microsoft’s offering.
Now it seems I have learned nothing since now I’m on forums where people are arguing microsoft vs Google vs Apple.
“No company is your friend”, is what I’d say as a kid, and is what I’ll say now too. It must be something about human nature that creates this behavior.
I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you'll ever s…
> pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads because it doesn't do away with _all_ the ads: every video still has the video maker themselves talking about their 'sponsor' for at least a minute, reminding us to 'like and subscribe' for at least ten seconds, and a patreon scroll of users that have paid extra for another three minutes
Creators can't live from YouTube alone (yt premium makes this better afaik, but you still get paid per watch time, which can go against your content or ethics), so they do sponsored ads integrated into their videos. For some the yt-alone revenue is only 20-40% of the total.
I believe I "trust" (in terms I think we are using here) Microsoft more than Google - for purpose of business - simply because of decades worth of inertia and ongoing happenstance. Not because of some principled notion of good vs evil manifest as corporate anthropomorphism. Little things like "I can still directly run my 90s code on my windows 11 box" provides very strong degrees of this for me - but only in isolated scopes. Who knows what the hell the xbox or office teams are doing over in their dark corners? Blowing away all this detailed nuance for "aggregate name good/bad" is (to me) the most hilariously shitty way to go about navigating technology when working with vendors who have trillion dollar market caps.
On the other hand, I would "trust" Google to entertain me more than Microsoft via their products & services. I don't get much fun out of bing videos these days.
If I had to get one thing across to the principled crowd - Pretend like you are playing an RTS when working with megacorps. Try to zoom your mini map in just a tiny bit so you can see how the one big red square is actually a shitload of smaller ones.
Interesting, I still don't, though I acknowledge perhaps Google has the greater capacity for harm; here's why. Over time, Google absolutely has been in a position to abuse data, and to some extent it has done so -- but honestly, if you compare what they COULD do to what they END UP DOING, they're not doing so bad at all. They mostly self-correct relatively nicely. Microsoft, on the other hand, clearly does the bare m…
Any data they have is available to federal police without a warrant.
The federal police are absolutely capable and willing to abuse the data to violate human rights.
The out of control intelligence community in the USA are like the agents from The Matrix - they can subvert any otherwise-trustworthy participant in the system. This means none of the participants are trustworthy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's valuable to Microsoft, but why would anybody else want to pay for data about the usage of a Microsoft product? And why would Microsoft sell it? Like would you want to sell information like "X% of users can't figure out how to change the code formatting settings"? Or if you did learn something cool and useful, why would you sell it to the potential competition?
You know those preinstalled-but-not-really app ads that are in the Start Menu, for Candy Crush and the like? How much do you think those are worth — what's the right CPM for them? (And yes, these are adspace, with CPM costs — even if you never click+install Candy Crush from the start menu, you're still being reminded of its existence every time you open the start menu, so the impressions are valuable, not just the co…
Everything you do as a company, that creates value, also indirectly helps your ad prices if you start selling ads. That is the Google strategy: they used to deliver immense value with little monetization and now the balance has changed.
Having an issue with this with that reasoning is akin to having an issue with a company creating anything of value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any sources or evidence to support this claim?
TPM, Widevine, Web Environment integrity, NGSCB; codenamed Palladium, SafetyNet…
We take the freedom associated with personal computers as granted, but these devices might be the exception rather than the norm.
Businesses’ singular pursuit of short-term profits over the past four decades has kept wages down, utterly destroyed the environment, and eroded the global working-class.
It is thus now difficult to trust the same corporations to “do the right thing” or “lead us to a better tomorrow.”
Fool me once…
Finding more or less trust in the newfound altruism of the very same companies at the heart of the system that created or supported all these negative externalities suddenly espousing new and reformed values is rich.
I can’t believe anybody actually trusts them after looking at the state of the world they created. I grant the argument that you might trust one more than the other, relative to one another, but one thing the past century should have taught all of us is that we shouldn’t lend our trust to profit-seeking private companies as they aren’t incentivized to “do the right thing” generally.
I’m all for collective efforts and even companies changing the world for the better. I just don’t think the current crop will suddenly reform with Aquarian awareness and become model benevolent entities suddenly worthy of extending our personal trust.
Maybe after 4 decades of good behavior…
I love VSCode, I use Google Workspace for my domain, run a Mac and an iPhone (and use iCloud), a Surface Go 2 with Linux (quite workable), I host on all sorts of stuff. Uncritically associating "trust" with a brand is a mistake. Microsoft are no more on the side of the angels than anyone else (and are very clearly on the other side in some of the legal positions they stake out, such as their amicus brief in support o…
I think MS is an awful company that tries to win by destroying the competition using all sorts of legal and illegal tricks to do so.
At the same time, it MS starts a new product, I would trust them to support it for a reasonable amount of time and give a reasonable amount of transition time if they did decide to wind it down based entirely on their history.
OTOH, 4 years ago I thought that Google was a much better supporter of Open Source but even then I wouldn’t trust them enough to not sunset a new product with months of notice at best to actually use something new they came up with.