Microsoft, since Satya took over, is a developer-first company. Everything they're doing is designed to give developers better tools on whatever platform they choose.

As we're all aware by now, Google is an advertising company (with a heap of technology, but it's still a company which primarily sells advertising).

I would put it simply: Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company, and Google is an ad company. Because that's what these companies sell to keep themselves alive.

Imagine what would happen if they all joined forces. Thin (less powerful than rpi) Macbook running Windows with Google ads in the OS!

Yeah the worst of all three worlds.

I'm convinced that Microsoft will soon offer a "free" version of Windows 10, supported by explicit tracking, advertising, and promotions (q.v., Candy Crush). I think it will be quite successful.

actually you can use windows 10 indefinitely for free. It has a little watermark but otherwise few restrictions

there's not even a watermark for me. i downloaded from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10I...

i skipped the part during installation where it says to enter a key. after install, it says windows is activated, no watermark, no countdown. i don't use it, though. i just don't trust free shit anymore.

Did you install Win10 previously on the machine? It recognizes the license from the hardware ID it generates.

Yeah, it'd be interesting to get a definitive answer here...

oh, uh, maybe. i bought the system off craigslist a few years back.

So, like the one there is already that you have to pay for?

But it would be free (or very cheap)!

At the cost of everything.

"free"

You dropped the /s.

It's a bit late.

Apple build advanced products with vertical integration (taking risks, but with a high profit margin). Microsoft sells "cheap" software (historically using nasty commercial tactics). Google is an AI company. By luck, trying to give meaning to web pages and search requests brings a lot of money from ads. Google tries to get knowledge about every aspects of our lives (mail, contact, documents, travel, interests) in order to build smarter IA (like Alphago). The main risk of Google is to be broken in pieces for monopoly. Google is implied in politic to protect itself and gain military contracts. IMHO, the future of Google is about building skynet (and terminator). Earning money is a side effect.

To be fair to Google (and I say that as a massive skeptic), they are diversifying their business model, most notably by offering cloud services and developer tools. At one point 98% of their revenue was from advertising, and probably they saw the writing on the wall that it was time to diversify. Google Cloud seems to be doing well. I’m not sure what the revenue breakdown is now, but also not sure we can entirely call them an advertising company anymore.

Roughly 84% of their revenue is coming through ads. I think it’s fair to call them an advertising company

https://martechtoday.com/google-posts-31-1b-in-total-revenue...

And I'd say that a significant portion of the remaining 16% is a byproduct of platforms for selling ads (e.g. Android) or just monetizing infrastructure Google had anyhow to serve ad related services (GCS, Google Drive).

The one thing coming to mind which is not designed to boost advertising is their Pixel line (after they killed the rest of their hardware, of course) but even that is not as much of a standalone activity as it is a way to effectively steer the future of the Android ecosystem.

Ask yourself this: Which Google products or services would have justification as standalone P&L units, without collecting user data and sending it to the mothership? Not too many.

Android

Cloud

X

Waymo

Play (the non-admob parts: app hosting/monetization, licensed content providing (music, movies/tv).

ChromeOS / Classroom

The entire Hardware division (which now includes Nest)

An awful lot of the Geo/Maps org is oriented away from direct advertising.

FWIW, you didn't ask, and my answer didn't include, other significant pieces of Google investment that are not remotely ad driven, like Deepmind & the entire RMI (Research & Machine Intelligence) organizations.

Once upon a time, Google was known for those low-distraction text-only banners...

What I am trying to say: The whole online advertising business would not be that creepy if Google and Facebook wouldn't compete on who can track more out of the web users. The reason why we call them an advertising company, is that their core actions are driven by their advertising business. Otherwise, you would consider calling them a search company ;-)

> Everything they're doing is designed to give developers better tools on whatever platform they choose

This is what people said about Google too a few years back.

The reality is: Everything they're doing is designed to increase the company value for their shareholders.

Obviously, but what are the means to that end? All public companies are in the quest of increasing shareholder value - some of them do this by selling tobacco, others by monetizing user data (in other words, ad services) and others by providing developer tools and platforms.

And? Vanguard does things to increase the return for their shareholders. Should I not invest with them?

Actually no. Vanguard has a different arrangement from pretty much any company in that it is owned by the funds it manages. As such any return vanguard earns for shareholders is money they charged the shareholders in the first place. At best it is a zero sum game, and more likely it is inefficient.

Your statement is true and completely uninteresting. We’re talking about how companies pursue this goal.

But that is an obvious observation. Almost a tautology. The question is how they choose to go about doing it. One company plans to keep selling me off to advertisers. Another plans to provide me with software.

> One company plans to keep selling me off to advertisers. Another plans to provide me with software.

That's not exactly true. Both companies have shown that they _will_ switch to selling something different when they believe they can make more money that way.

Also, both these companies spy on you while using their products, and both sell that data to their advertisers. It's not just Google.

You should use both their products as you want, when they help you. My point is mainly not to trust that the company behind the developer products is some kind of a good actor. They will sell you out when it fits them.

Microsoft tracks you for advertising purposes as well.

Sadly it became a user hostile company at the same it became developer friendly. So while the tools (.net Core, VS Code, Xamarin) are a pleasure to use, I hardly boot Windows 10 anymore except for VS. The UI inconstancies, the productivity-nerfed start menu, the pervasive ads, etc. all contribute to gave that negative sentiment.

Also while MS is good to integrate third party open source projects, it also fails at the same time to address some core concerns of developpers from its own platform. For years people have wanted a portable UI framework for .net but the idea is always dismissed by the higher management. So, I think Microsoft is actually a developer-second, hype-first company.

I don't believe Microsoft has changed at all, they've just gotten better at marketing.

Modern Microsoft and Google are both now trying to make their millions by aggregating and selling customer data. Windows 10 is mostly spyware.

That doesn't even make sense. Google is the ad company. If they "sold your data" as claimed, they'd be giving away their biggest advantage to their competitors.

Isn't that just selling user data with extra steps?

It's using data to their advantage, but no it's not being sold.

Using data to target ads is still data exfiltration.

Because the destination knows the targeting and the IPs.

No, in the same way that selling wheat isn't selling land with extra steps.

The bigger and more authority something wields the more people should be should be inclined to be skeptical of it.

More than a decade ago the behemoth was Microsoft. Now it's Google. I guess if those positions reversed again I'd go back to being more skeptical of Microsoft.

Microsoft still the largest software house. Of course Google is bigger on the web, but this doesn't make MS automatically a better choice even if it's fancy to call MS a trustworthy company as they invested few millions (out of billions) into FOSS ecosystem, basically because their cloud platform, meanwhile do everything to destroy competition everywhere else.

>meanwhile do everything to destroy competition everywhere else.

That's not even remotely true. Powershell core, SQL on Linux, WSL, vs code, etc etc. They're doing their best to give customers choice in just about every new product they release.

Developers. Those are choices for developers, not their customers.

Their customers are still primarily enterprise/gov.

And the reason for giving choice and candy to the developers is to keep them onboard and happy to develop for the ecosystem, so that customers will continue to buy in as the ecosystem has what they need.

I'm not saying WSL or VS Code are evil. They make developing on Windows a joy. But they make it a joy with that goal in mind.

Really? SQL isn't free. Github isn't free. Linux on Azure isn't free.

The only other apps they're selling on-prem to enterprises are Exchange and AD.

In both cases, their focus is on moving customers to a hosted/cloud based version, so it's not something I would ever expect them to spend a ton of time and effort porting to another on-premises OS. For SMB they've become far, far more open both licensing it to third parties as well as helping out the samba crew with the open source version.

Do you have a single example of them being openly hostile? Or you're just whining about them not open sourcing and giving away the farm?

> Do you have a single example of them being openly hostile?

The spyware literally built into Win 10 - and backported to previous windows - which can't be disabled without third party products?

To me, that's openly hostile to everyone. Note - "everyone" includes developers. I'm not sure why many people seem to give MS a free pass on this. :/

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DataCollection

I'm not sure why everyone pretends this is an MS thing and not an industry thing :/

Is it really an industry thing? There do seem to be several large bad actors at present (MS being one of them), and but not sure it really extends to most of the IT industry.

Maybe you're meaning some non-IT industry? eg Marketing?

I feel like you hit reply on the wrong comment?

Nowhere did I claim them to be hostile. I never expressed my thoughts on how they acquire business as good or bad.

All I did was state that "They're doing their best" isn't out of the goodness of their hearts, there's a biz decision behind it.

> Or you're just whining about them not open sourcing and giving away the farm?

Way to try and attack my character. Never said a word of what you're accusing.

I’m not sure I so much trust Microsoft as that I’m fairly certain they’re not actively out to fuck me over.

With Google I’m not so sure any more. Hopefully I’ll soon be able to say goodbye as well.

Nobody thought that under Gates and Ballmer, either.

Everybody thought Gates-era Microsoft was actively out to fuck over everyone it could. They happened to be right.

Out to fuck over competitors, not users (because to microsoft’s business, users = customers). Google is actively making users’ lives worse.

Uh, Microsoft's nickname in the 90s was the "Evil Empire".

Nah, IBM was still the "Evil Empire" in the first half of the '90s, IIRC. They did things that make Microsoft and Google look like saints.

Microsoft didn't take over the Evil Empire title until the late '90s, IMO.

That was after the fact.

There are difference between backing and acquiring. Plus, GitLab is open sourced and self-hostable.

If Google wants to throw some of their money on something that end user can fully control, then why not be happy about it?

> GitLab is open sourced ...

GitLab is open core, not open source. They say so themselves:

https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-open-core-gith...

You are right about the open-core. However, in that blog-post, Sid mentioned that we are an open-source company and remarked that open-core is the more accurate term.

Because they’ve gotten pretty effective at the open source bait and switch too. Look at android.

I just have mail left to migrate, which in itself is proving quite difficult. Mail services are plentiful, paid or free, but mail for 5+ custom domains, where i'm not paying $5/mo per user, those are hard to come by.

I'm planning on, once again, spinning up my own mailserver on a $5/mo VPS. Have lots of domains, but not that many users/traffic.

https://mxroute.com/ is what I use for this very purpose and so far I'm very pleased with it.

This looks exactly like what i'm looking for.

I'm slightly bothered by the fact that their servers are located in the worlds surveillance hotspots no. 2 and 3. but i guess email always has at least 2 involved parties, so it's not exactly "top secret".

That's true. But unecrypted email really isn't secure anyway. I'd prefer this solution to using Google Mail and having my emails read for targeted advertising.

I'm also always actively looking, and they look interesting, but their recent blog posts don't fill me with too much confidence (although they have to be commended on being so open about it). Any personal experience there?

Yeah, I'd agree about the recent blog posts. But I've been a customer of theirs for about a year and have only good things to say about the quality of the product. I think I originally came across them from another hacker news comment too.

I used to run my own mail server for years but spam was becomming a problem as it always does when running your own system and I thought the pricing of most of the services was poor if you had lots of addresses but didn't send/receive many emails. Spam hasn't been an issue for me with mxroute so far and their infrastructure seems to be pretty solid.

Used them for a bit. Their webmail is pants and the search is so slow. Switching to Google Suite has made my life much eaiser.

Fastmail allows multiple domains under a single user account through aliases.

If you are the only actual user of those emails accounts, then it's a great option (I have 5+ domains under a single account with them)

If you haven’t seen it yet check out mailcow for a nice way to manage your own mail.

https://mailcow.email/

I've tried mailcow, and it is also being considered. I'm trying to dig up "dirt" on it to see just how secure it is.

I'm always very nervous when it comes to running docker in production. Also, it looks like it (by default) stores emails in a docker container, which in my book is just overcomplicating things. While i don't mind software being containerized, i much prefer having my data stored in the plain old filesystem.

I have chosen Fastmail. Cheap, works really well (but I am a new customer so more time needs to pass), you can register I think 100 custom domains on 1 account, aliases, catch all addresses, etc.. They host caldav and carddav stuff too. Their webui is really fast, much faster than gmail, and IMAP works great.

AND they can import your gmail account. They imported mine in a few hours, 4.5gb of mails.

Their pricing says $5 per user per month with custom domains. That's exactly what the parent comment said they didn't want. Am I missing some cheaper plan?

Microsoft only left US Federal oversight seven years ago. Satya has only been in charge for four years. Do you think the mindset of an international 130,000 employee company can change that fast?

The changes that Satya implemented were only possible because the majority of employees agreed with his vision.

Anecdotally speaking, the culture enforced by Ballmer was not that popular among Microsoft's employees.

Your two sentences contradict each other. If Ballmer's implementations were unpopular with employees, why did he hold office for so long?

What I'm saying is, employees don't get to decide how a company is run.

Yes. Because you don’t have to change all of it. A lot of those people are in support, logistics, or working in extremely stable projects (e.g. office).

Besides, the risk here is toxic managerial choices, and you can and do swap out VPs and similar over half a decade.

Yeah I would agree there, I'd rather take Github over Gitlab if Google takes over *lab.

arguably true but irrelevant: Alphabet's GV has invested, along with others, in GitLab (and they had already last year as well).

They haven't bought GitLab

Here are more details about Series C round of investment https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20-million....

Me too.