blahblah12

Unfortunatley like many of the other comments have pointed out. This is incorrect. Most of the military currently uses Teams and O365. The military deal for hololens is going through and the shipments are greater thant he initial order. That information is dated.

Comments were deleted.

So we’re suggesting a 3rd-party PR firm likely coordinated public criticism about Zoom, an app that was undergoing hyper growth and entered the public consciousness in 2020 due to WFH and COVID. We don’t think media outlets would likely have wanted to voraciously cover Zoom stories because Zoom became one of the most widely used apps out of nowhere?

The logic appears to be: I saw a lot of news stories about X, therefore X was caused by Y, without recognizing that Z is just as likely a cause for X.

Um, just think of what you're suggesting. At MS some department (marketing, sales, product managers, devs?) somehow coordinated a bunch of press leaks (not sure how these were even determined to be 'leaks'), made sure that media outlets collectively believed that they were problematic, and then used those leaks to influence sales?

It's a stretch to attribute to malice what can be attributable to other environmental factors. Could it be that Zoom was/is the dominant player in the video conferencing space in 2020/2021, so media outlets were keen to cover stories around Zoom? WebEx and Google Hangouts vulnerabilities have also not received as much coverage as Zoom.

Wrong, Microsoft’s internal incentives are aligned with GitHub remaining independent and building developer mindshare. The, relatively, minuscule business they get from MPA (No Azure, Office subs, Windows subs) is extremely fringe in comparison to losing long term developer mindshare. Even if you thought of representative companies in the MPA,e.g., Netflix, Warner, etc., which are only loosely coupled to the MPA itself, this is still tiny in contrast to overall developer mindshare. This is why they reinstated popcorntime etc etc.

This makes no sense to me. An iPhone without a browser? There are a dozen other random apps and features in O365. Is bundling or building of these features prohibited because Microsoft Access competes with Airtable? I’d argue Teams is half zoom half chat. It’s about as similar to Slack as Access is to Airtable.

Even the selling separately argument seems absurd. How is this any different than adding another Office SKU?

This was an accident. It took a bit to remedy but that was not the intention.

100% this. Mermaid is fantastic for the happy path, but as soon as you run into any issues, the lack of flexibility makes it nearly impossible to use (It tames more time to use mermaid than to go back to traditional diagramming tools).

That’s definitely not verified. I’ve read that rumor multiple times and each time, it hasn’t happened.

On another note, having listened to James Whittaker talk while at Microsoft, he was a phenomenal storyteller and speaker.

Anecdote, at one of the affected companies and we’ve been wfh. I honestly think my productivity has tanked. That’s the general sentiment for other folks that I’ve talked to, too

Does not surprise me. Just wanted to clarify that the Microsoft donates to X line is a lot more nuanced than the monolithic portrayal by OP

So employees donate money to a fund that they then don’t have a say in and for reasons that might be as unrelated as wanting to get good seats for a talk by Phil Knight.

This independent org then donates across party lines to issues that the manager believes are aligned with corporate interests that may also conflict with other corporate interests such as green initiatives and LGBTQ issues since a republican senator might be for rural broadband access but not gay marriage.

There was also an internal movement to try and starve the PAC by not donating to it.

And TBC, throwing a wrench in this even more, from a pure money perspective we’re talking about tens - hundreds of thousands vs. 1 billion.

Really, my point is that, like any large organization, a manichean view of things is not sufficiently nuanced and does a disservice to the complexity intrinsic with large groups of people.