Don’t employees have any say in some of the design , implementation, and quality bar? Management folks are employees as well. But perhaps they prefer the paycheck to voicing concerns around bad decisions. Nothing wrong with that but throwing all the blame on faceless management and structure seems not right since it evolves from collective activities.
“Show me the incentives and I’ll tell you the outcome” is exactly about this situation. People who do what they feel is right may be able to do so as long as it doesn’t conflict with company policy, but when it does (say you spend a little more time on perfecting a feature), it gets noticed and eventually corrected.
OS is such a broad term, especially when applied to Windows which is closer to a Linux distro. Is it the kernel? Windows is fine there as by all accounts the issues are higher up. They’ve had some problems with their update process which is surprising - historically that team would have been populated by the better engineers. most of the other problems have been in the shell and UI where good engineering discipline is not to be quite as expected.
Yes, but the OS fundamentals are for Azure first, Windows last.
Azure makes money, 50% of Windows computers are basically free and need to get you to sign up for a subscription some how. The other 50% are Windows Pro/Enterprise, but MS assumes they'll get that money forever so doesn't put any resources into that. In 10 years the kids switching to Linux on desktop today will be in charge of the business deals and switch corporations to linux because they're not scared of it like the current business IT leaders
They are not free. OEM costs money. Hence with every laptop with Windows preinstalled, you pay a fraction to Microsoft, even if you immediately uninstall and add Linux.
Maybe not, there are plenty of hard things to do at Microsoft scale, hypervisors (which I guess could count as "OS" but maybe not "Windows" in the consumer-product line sense), compilers, languages, hardware since Microsoft is doing that too, browsers (although the hard part is chrome-based, probably they contribute to it), databases, distributed systems for cloud products, etc. Plenty of hard things to do.
This is obvious for anyone that understands sales and marketing. The real question isn’t whether this was true—the question is why does anyone expect this revelation would change anything?
They made their wealth. They bought their politicians. In the worst possible case for them they would pay some fee that amounts to absolutely nothing making a dent in their personal day to day lives as a consequence of their actions.
It’s the cost of doing business these days. Do the wrong thing so long as you make more than enough money to cover the penalty fee.
> In the worst possible case for them they would pay some fee that amounts to absolutely nothing making a dent in their personal day to day lives as a consequence of their actions.
Probably, not definitely
It would be possible to put the executives in jail.
Possibly, yes, but those executives have enough money to cut a deal to not only stay out of jail, but to also fund the re-election campaign for the DA + prosecution team, and to also give a job to the prosecutor's cousin, sibling, and/or in-law.
China? Say what you will about the CCP they have the balls to jail and execute anyone who is perceived to stand in their way.
Kids spending too much time on TikTok and not doing homework is a danger to the mission of making China number one.
Awareness is more important than government regulation. Assuming you are a parent, we as parents should be more concerned and help our kids grow with a healthy relationship with aggressive marketing and addictive features, by actively avoiding it, setting up time restrictions, etc.. No one else can help kids besides their parents. Everything else is too slow to be effective and with mild efficacy.
Based on the aggressive reactions all across the billionaire board toward the European wrist-slap initiative, I would guess Europe is moving in the correct direction with it and the slaps would correctly hurt.
Protesting is basically "doing nothing, loudly." It looks virtuous but has almost zero actual affect on policy. Does any politician actually look at a protest and say "Oh, my, look at that, people don't like what I'm doing! Looks like I have to change my mind."
They never change their minds, that's because the police are willing to beat the protesters for them. The Civil Rights movement is an example of (mostly, but not always peaceful) protest that changed things within living memory. Gay rights advances in recent decades definitely owe a lot to demonstrations and public organizing that put the issues into public conversation. Women's suffrage movements also featured many protests. Policy effects are everywhere.
What has no effect pretty much ever is protesting foreign policy, because the majority of people in any country neither care nor know what happens anywhere else.
Civil disobedience and other exertions of citizen power are only a subset of "protest". I've been to a lot of protests and most of them accomplished jack shit.
It's very rare for anything to change as a direct result of protests, but the act of protesting brings issues into the public consciousness that weren't necessarily there before. That is the real driver of change. Changing public opinion directly transforms the Overton Window and limits the acceptable range of opinions and actions politicians can take. Just because no laws were directly changed doesn't mean your protest did nothing.
Politicians are like ROM. You can't change them once they are programmed. If you want a different function, you need to swap them out. Yelling in the street is not going to get you anywhere.
The reason Civil Rights, Gay Rights and so on got traction was not through protestors changing politicians' minds. It was through the masses changing their minds and actually going to the ballot boxes to replace their (essentially robot) politicians.
That's demonstrably false. Politicians like Strom Thurmond and Joe Biden enjoyed long careers in the Senate after opposing the Civil Rights movement. Lindsey Graham opposes gay marriage today.
It was also through the violent actions of terrorist groups that police couldn't keep under control. For every time the politicians agreed with a Rosa Parks, it was because they were afraid of a Black Panthers.
While the police and politicians were afraid, it's not because there was a real terrorist threat from the Black Panthers or other militant black movements of the time. While the Panthers had some issues with violence, almost all of that was dedicated to infighting, and the few incidents that weren't were almost all revealed to be incited and planned by agent provacateurs. They were just afraid of blacks, and of giving the "lower" classes any kind of idea that they could effect change.
Note that I'm not saying you, yourself, are a proponent of the status quo, deliberately spreading propaganda.
But protests are absolutely not useless.
"waaaah they don't change Trump's mind after a single protest waaaaah" of course not. That's not what they're there to do. That's the win condition, not the only move in the game.*
Protests have a variety of important effects, but let's just focus on two of the big ones, which are closely linked:
1) They tell the other people who disagree with what is going on that they are not alone. That there are others like them out there, and that if they do try to do something (whether that's go to a protest themselves, call their congresspeople, or whatever), it won't be just shouting into the void.
2) They tell the people who agree with what is going on that this is not over. They can't just expect to be greeted as liberators; there are people in their own hometown who think that this is not OK, it shouldn't be allowed to continue, and anyone who supports it can expect at least a side-eye at the supermarket, if not much more serious social shunning.
And no: neither of these lead directly to a change in the policies that are being protested. But that doesn't mean that they're useless, any more than it's useless to, say, release wolves into Yellowstone, if what you care about are some of the myriad downstream effects of a trophic cascade.
* Not, I would note very firmly, that it's a game. This is merely a convenient metaphor.
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