OMG Microsoft!

Community Tech Policy & News
1

Everybody seen the open letter mailing from Satya Nadella?

Short version: "we're going to lay off massive amounts of people because we're late to the technology party, and now employees are going to pay for the mistakes of the greedy management".

I also hate how he quotes himself quoting Nietsche (like WTF?), and hate how he quotes Rilke. (Not coincidentally two German authors, probably because Microsoft is doing so bad in Germany now that their spyware is banned from government systems like in China, but if that's the way to "win German hearts", they should really fire their copywriters and marketeers, because pretty much all Germans feel dirty after seeing him abuse those quotes...

He wants to digitalize the lives of the whole world, while maintaining security and privacy... so either he's lying through is teeth, or Microsoft is going full open source...

He also want to connect everything... so Microsoft is becoming a linux company, because that connects everything, whereas with every "update" from Microsoft closed source console crapware, less things connect with each other...

He also sees the future of gaming with the XBox, and will put devices and cloud first.... so bye MS-Windows for PC gaming...

His entire speech pretty much reads: we're going to throw out an obscene number of people, because our yearly results that will come out on the 22nd are crappy even after all of the creative accounting we did, and we'll also limit our customer base to the English-speaking rich and wealthy, and don't care about the rest.

Satya Nadella is such a disappointment! I actually even preferred coke-head Ballmer over this guy. He acts like a creepy manipulator in my opinion...

2

Link to letter?

3

NVM Zoltan

Here for anyone interested

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/ceo/index.html

4

Microsoft is heading into madness, I can imagine windows becoming less popular because Windows 8 is just absolute crap, hell China banned their governments from using it because of security issues.  Microsoft was even thinking of selling their xbox one franchise off to another company because it wasnt doing so well.  Microsoft is greedy.

Tux-Microsoft.jpg800x500

5

So in the mean time, Microsoft has announced that they're going to sack at least 18000 people before the end of next year.

They want to sack 12500 Nokia employees with that.

So Nadella effectively is an even bigger liar than Ballmer. Guess we're back to Bill Gates days, when Microsoft says "we're going to put the focus on mobile devices and create jobs", they actually mean "we're going to sack an obscene number of people for no reason, and are going to decimate the jobs in our mobile devices branches most of all."

Lol Microsoft... they've already started a propaganda offensive in the German press a couple of days ago, when they paid off the new mayor of München to criticize München's Linux project that has celebrated it's 10th Anniversary and was the first major organization to throw out Microsoft and save millions of Euros and augment security, efficiency and working conditions in the process with great success. That criticism by München's new mayor against such an overwhelmingly successful Linux migration thought us two things: 1. Microsoft paid for a big chunk of the election campaign of the new socialist mayor of München, and 2. Most of the jobs Microsoft is going to eliminate are in Europe (i.e. Nokia, so UK and Finland mainly), and they're afraid of getting an even worse reputation in Europe. The fact that Nadella was abusing quotes by Nietsche and Rilke before was also a dead giveaway.

Face it: Microsoft is toast outside of North-America. They've really done it this time. I'm very disappointed in the way Nadella turned out to be such a pathetic corporate bastard. Microsoft needs to die in the EU now for the lying and spying bastards they are, and that's exactly what they're going to do.

So Microsoft only needed the Nokia patents to extort money on Androids and iPhones. They don't really want to invest in making their own devices, leeching off of the efforts of others is way more cost effective, and offers more than enough opportunity to sell lucrative backdoors and private data to all kinds of governmental and commercial instances that are willing to pay for that.

The EU needs to get together with China and shake off the US patent system. The US corporate and governmental universe badly needs a lesson in respect, culture, civilization, humanity, and above all, STYLE!

6

Yup, and as a Finn I'm angry, disappointed and ashamed that "we" let Microsoft do this to Nokia, it's the trojan horse all over again. But mourning doesn't solve anything, and all I can do is just hope that local ex-employees will strenghten other companies like Nokia Networks, Jolla (fingers crossed) and various local tech companies.

Stuff can be rebuilt, but trust takes tremendous time to regain, and Microsoft just lost the very last bit they had left over here.

 

7

I have a Jolla, i like it allot.

8

Yup, Jolla has a good chance of making a difference. I love my Jolla, but they haven't been pushing out a lot of updates lately, which is disappointing. Maybe with some strengthening by sacked Nokia people, they can find the means of making their products even better. Let's hope for the best, because it's a great product. SailfishOS is much superior to Android, Tizen, Windows Phone and iOS, Jolla just needs to have the guts to drive their products forward.

I think the EU should not only invest in MPTCP and 5G together with Korea like they're doing, but should subsidize more EU companies that can bring technology into the 21st Century instead of clinging on to the old dysfunctional Microsoft and Google crap. It's about high time to kill US software patents. They make no sense whatsoever from a legal or logical perspective, and are very disruptive to the free market economy and technological evolution.

I also think the EU should really start protecting the rights of the European citizens, with mandatory warnings on closed source software, import bans on software that is suspected to contain US military cyber-weapons, like the NSA backdoors in MS-Windows, and should put the burden of proof on the software producers, that need to provide open source auditing and software integrity systems before being allowed for use in the EU.

The same goes for hardware. Intel should prove that their chips contain no US cyber-ordnance like faulty RNG's and system backdoors, and prove that for every single chip that is imported in Europe.

It's about time to make a stand and stop the pillaging by the US corporations.

This is more than about the grab-and-run culture of US corporations, this is about stopping the acts of war of the US against the EU citizens and EU governments. The cyber warfare of the US against the EU is no different than the act of war by Russia that shot a passenger plane down over the Ukraine. There is no difference between attacking people sitting in a plane and people sitting in an economy or a culture or at home at their computer. These are vile and despicable acts of war, and they are facilitated by US corporations like Microsoft and Google. It's a dirty mercenary war the likes of which history has never before seen in terms of number of victims and total amount of damage to economies, culture and education.

9

@ everybody cheering for Microsofts downfall

may i remind you that if MS morphs into a dead company-husk / patent-troll & turns the harassment of open-source projects up to 11, they will be the giant that can still inflict allot of damage in their death throes.

@ Zoltan

I also think the EU should really start protecting the rights of the European citizens, with mandatory warnings on closed source software, import bans on software that is suspected to contain US military cyber-weapons, like the NSA backdoors in MS-Windows....

Yes they should, but they just lack any sense computer affinity. The political reality is that an EU directive along these lines, would end in utter chaos. The lobbyists would have an easy game subverting this into horrible evil. Creating companies for vetting software, that just act as parasite collecting money from the EU as well as making software companies pay a sort of software-toll, while not actually doing anything along the lines of filtering backdoored software.

I have been lobbying pretty hard to get my government to spend money on existing free software projects to get some of the missing pieces for large office functionality build for linux.

There's been some success, but it's hard to get allot of money for something that government functionaries can't understand.

The way forward is to have the good software just displace the bad one, trying to ban stuff is very difficult, corporations are very adapt at navigating around such obstacles.

At the moment there's definitely a fun game of trying to steer Microsoft lobbyists towards pro Linux Administrators that would never even consider anything other then open-source.

10

Honestly I'd personally like to see Microsoft go to shit in the US as well. So many people I know turn a blind eye to things like this, for a ton of companies (mainly Microsoft, Google, and Apple). And what do they call it? Oh yeah, PROGRESS. In a perfect world, more people would be using Linux and it would force companies like Microsoft to see how much people don't like what they're doing and maybe do something about it (wich we all know is what "always" happens), but of course that is likely a long way off. So for now I guess we just sit here and watch it all unfold....

11

Let's not burn the witch until we've learned the whole story. I'm all for open source and I'm running all my machines on linux. Also, I absolutely despise their efforts lately.

However, they are a company that needs to make a profit. Like it or not - Nadella is making progress. Ballmer made some bold statements about staying the course - Nadella is not. He even recently said that Windows is not their main focus. None would have dared said anything like that since Gates ran the company.

They may want to sack 12,5k nokia employes, but considering their acquirement of Nokias 25k employees, inlcuding duplicate staff of managers, support, and programmers (they lack none of them) I have a hard time believing they sacked them because of patent greed, nor corporate agendas to dominate the world. They simply had enough of them already. Nokia was well under the surface when MS acquired them. They had lost tons of investments on their Symbian survival efforts. They needed to break new ground and Nokia was a cheap target that delivered recognizable wares of great quality.

However Nokia has great talent regarding Qt, they researched and owned the Qt tech for years. Qt's a widely used toolkit compatible with all platforms and MS could've seized the opportunity to build the next app-standard with it - and they didn't. It was a collision of interest with their own invested XAML- and .Net-standards they still continue to fight. They simply seized the opportunity of a limping company, Nokia, and took it. They're not a good buyer, but they try to consolidate their losses as best they can. Google acquired Motorola and sold it a year later for a fraction of the cost, none exclaimed hatred nor despise? They kept the valuable areas of Motorola Mobile though - made the moto 360-watch which is one of the most desired devices since the first iPhone.

MS are trying to save face with making the compilation engine "customizable" linux style with Roslyn. All under the impression though, not the fact. Also they recently made ASP.Net open source. This is just for show and far more alluding than a proprietarily closed "enemy" to open source as before. I am sure their licensing terms are, or at least will be, far worse than any real open source agreement.

Nadella is turning a freighter, it takes time and this one is a really slow turner as well.

All things aside, I'd never trust them anyways. And as an important side note - Nadella is only the face of the board and senior governing individuals (now including Bill Gates again). After all, he has a nice face.

12

Finland always manages :)

/Sweden

13

Could you explain in more detail how this is "a fun game of trying to steer Microsoft lobbyist towards pro-linux users"? Are they ignorant, selfish, payed by MS, or just plain stupid? Do you have a percentage for each group?

14

Well, I truly believe you shouldn't bash Google so much. They've innovated the web most of all, the browser. None has tried until google came and changed the playing field. Without them you would be sitting with internet explorer 6 still. You don't have to be a google user and even if you are you can disable the terrible ad-tracking, and it's gone. They're fighting for us the smart way, they have people in the government trying to procure a safe and secure internet for you - no other company does that. And don't ask me how, but I'm in Sweden and know these things. You're the frontline, and if you don't choose your allies correctly you'll be beheaded like Ned Stark; quick & and unjust, by your worst enemies (comcast etc).

15

First thing first; You are not allies with a company. all company will have no moral, once they see a opportunity for more profit in the longer run.

 

Put up the right conditions, and 99% of all companies will end up like comcast.

16

Well the Microsoft guys are inexperienced with the "lobbyist-labyrinth"

Basically Lobbyist have to register in advanced if they want to meet with politicians or functionaries.

But they can't request names, since most positions are held by multiple people that act as a team.

When they register for a meet, they get to meet only the pro Linux people.

Just make sure that the Linux people know what's up, so they can preempt lobbyists meeting with susceptible people.

There are many more layers to this, like the frequently reshuffled teams, that makes it extremely opaque who does what, so lobbyist can 't just bypass to meet-up registration.

17

Gaming and MS Excel are the only two things that are "generally" better on Windows than on Mac or Linux.

microsoft will die, fully, when gaming moves to linux. Gamers are kind of a big deal for windows being able to keep young people and for gaming tech enthusiasts.

for the business world, microsoft will be irrelevant when there is an alternative to MS Excel... their actions in Germany have created a real opportunity for someone to develop a proper MS Excel alternative and prove that it works.

google will take longer to tame, but hopefully they'll make enough mistakes that will allow people to see how scary they are.

18

Zoltan hates and spews drivel about Microsoft, news at 11.

 

19

google will take longer to tame, but hopefully they'll make enough mistakes that will allow people to see how scary they are.

I'm not so sure:

short version:    google will fall once we go distributed

long version:

the google search engine could be replaced with a decentralized crawler like yacy, because Governments now look at the Internet as public opinion generator that has to be manipulated.

They will probably try to censor Google as well as get Google to spew out false results, at which point people will abandon Google just like they did with Yahoo or Altavista.

The EU right to be forgotten, that's being abused for censorship & has prompted allot of new yacy instances to go up.

If google's searches gets crippled by political meddling, the Mozilla foundation could just integrate yacy into Firefox and replace Google search.

I'm not so sure that google adds will continue to reign supreme without the search. The revenue from adds on Android isn't as profitable.

A compounding factor will be that webapps will slowly replace local apps because they are easier to develop and much more compatible with the internet of things. In that regard FirefoxOS could become good enough for most people.

I don't see Google as Software-giant like Microsoft that will dominate for decades, they still are a web-company first.

Those only have a limited shelf life.

If Mozilla would quite fucking around, they could integrate distributed protocols like cjdns & distributed services like yacy, dispora, own-cloud etc on their firefoxOS phones as well as other devices.

No centralized system could compete with the cost efficiency & reliability of a well designed distributed system.

 

20

Well before you judge Zoltan's hate of Microsoft, go research what evil shit that corporation has done & still does.

More often then not they behave like a parasite or a cancer, then a technology innovator.

Just look at what they did with Nokia, they basically inserted Elope as a Trojan, who ran Nokia in the ground, now they're kicking Nokia’s workforce on the street & use Nokia's patents to extort the Android market.

Maybe you can criticize Zoltan for his barely restrained rage-rants of fury, but that's form, as far as content is concerned he's not wrong about Microsoft.