Part of the hangup is that startups are shit at dealing with enterprise privacy contracts, whereas Microsoft probably has a whole department for that.

A product can work however it works, good or bad, but if you can't wrap contractual guarantees around it that are palatable to your enterprise customers, you're not going to get enterprise sales.

Microsoft is a monopoly and they've done everything they can to scare people about AI.

Can Cursor sign a DPA in addition to an enterprise contract where they actually have to put into concise writing what they are and aren't doing with our data? Microsoft will. Amazon will. But in my experience a lot of smaller players can't or won't. That's a legal blocker.

Microsoft already has access to all of your code on Github.

and your partner network, and your commit patterns, and your bug list, and your remote IP address while working, and you have to authenticate to them each time you use it (which means that they can turn off your access)

Many big companies are using GitHub Enterprise Server or some other self-hosted version control.

GitHub Copilot works fine with these; just authenticate against github.com first

My company isn't. Apparently, "We've heard of Microsoft" == "They won't do anything wrong with our data" in the minds of non-technical lawyer types.

This is such a common lazy cynical take on HN. “Microsoft is evil, therefore they will destroy their enterprise customer relationships by stealing their enterprise customer data, despite the fact that they explicitly state they will not do that.”

I would understand this mindset when it comes to consumer uses of it, but enterprise is where Microsoft makes its money and it would have to be the dumbest business decision ever to ruin the enterprise cash cow by doing that.

Please reconcile that idea with o365.

There are areas where Microsoft knows (or at least behaves as though) they have an effective unchallenged monopoly, and off boarding is too costly an endeavour.

“Please reconcile that idea with o365”

Please explain. Vague insinuations mean nothing.

Disagree. Vague insinuations mean everything.