Maybe check if you are charged for it

If it’s Microsoft related, might be something in your Partner Center.

I haven’t clicked through so all I know about Raycast is, “that’s the company that gets shoved into ads by copilot.”

Sounds like it’s not your fault but it’s probably doing some brand damage :/

They should probably get a lawyer to send a C&D.

There’s like 100 comments blaming raycast, they should just sue for damages lol.

Had I not seen this thread, I would have assumed they consented to it, and I'd never willingly interact with Raycast or it's team in any way. I still have a somewhat negative opinion, so I think it's safe to say there are damages.

As a data point, I consent to be counted as associating raycast with the Microsoft brand and viewing them negatively as a consequence of using pull requests as an advertising canvas.

They should sue to have the ads removed from the texts they were inserted into, which is a vastly more difficult problem than simply paying some dollars.

I hear you, but honestly it’s kind of funny to think a company would send C&D to stop free advertising for them. I’d be surprising to see if any company ever does that, whatever the people think small brands worth they actually worth way less than that.

Is it free advertising or free brand damage? (people might think that raycast had consented to this)

but as we know from this thread, Raycast didn't consent to this.

It might be interesting to see what a lawyer might think of this and if there are enough reasonable claims to genuinely sue for damages

(Raycast definitely seek a lawyer privately, just in case)

Well... I didn't know about them until now. Looks like a cool product, actually. Might have to try them out. What's that old saying?

Raycast is like Alfred, but with MORE AI. Which made me go 'ugh' even before this.

Automatic AI ads on it didn't help. But the team member saying they had no involvement in this brought my opinion of Raycast from 'ewwwwww' back to 'ugh'.

Creepy. Looks like they rolled it back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233

Collection of my thoughts which don't really get to a point:

- Microsoft owns GitHub, where Raycast is being mentioned thousands of times by their tooling.

- Microsoft is a modern popularizer of the infamous phrase, embrace extend extinguish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

- Microsoft has a history of monopoly behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

- From an empathetic perspective I hope for the sake of the customers of raycast and for its employees that Microsoft is not into any kind of negotiations with Raycast at the moment.

> Microsoft has a history of monopoly behavior

I just want to note that the case you link to was 25 years ago. The number of people working at Microsoft at the time who are still working there today is very small.

One of those people is the CEO though.

The Microsoft that was prosecuted for monopoly behaviour 25 years ago is definitely not the same Microsoft that owns:

- Github

- LinkedIn

- Activision Blizzard

- Xbox

- Azure, Sharepoint and Teams w/Copilot embedded everywhere

- major stake in OpenAI

- a multibillion dollar ad product portfolio (LinkedIn ads, Bing Ads)

After being told to not integrate Internet Explorer into the OS, they changed the name to EDGE and did it anyway? With the added excuse that it now compromises most of the file explorer functionality, too?

No, Edge isn’t Internet Explorer; they coexist if necessary for enterprise and legal reasons :)

> "history .. 25 years ago"

The comment was brief, and added detail is welcome, but corporate mission/culture often extends over time even with changes in leadership. Partly because of what was accepted in the past.

> I just want to note that the case you link to was 25 years ago. The number of people working at Microsoft at the time who are still working there today is very small.

That's just a long way of calling Microsoft a bunch of monkeys :-)

https://wiki.c2.com/?TheFiveMonkeys=

Wow this is a beautiful illustration :-) thanks for linking it to me.

True!

I think it is more reasonable to expect that the corporate behavior @ MS would remain in spite of the turn-over, especially if it's valuable / profitable to MS.

See "Tim Cook" at Apple and the preparation (the "we will do things Steve's way" pledge) run-up to him taking over after Steve Jobs's exit from CEO-ship was announced. Apple is still doing many business activities in the same way.