> Companies structure their relationships with Microsoft in detailed contracts
That might be so for big companies. Most smaller shops more likely just accept the (still extremely detailed) T&C's outright. That certainly structures the relationship, but I doubt there's much balancing involved.
I'm thinking of e.g. the medical lab next door, the girlfriend's gynecologist, most smaller businesses really, of which there are a ton which deal with relatively sensitive customer data.
> Instead of trusting me - think of the corporate incentive to do well here. Consider how much it would cost a company like Microsoft if employees were exposed to confidential customer data (our customers can work with medical data, so a fairly expensive legal nightmare)
The last 3 decades of big players misbehaving taught us they usually get a slap on the wrist for pretty much everything at worst, and a fine of half the money they made from the feature at best.
> They will instead pay a lot for MSFTs cloud service offering, which of course comes with the crucial promise that their data is safe and secured and handled in a way that is compliant with all privacy laws. Which of course isn't true, but that doesn't matter, the promise is what matters.
In what way is this not true? Obviously there is no perfection here, only degrees of risk. But this is literally why people pick MSFT over others. They have by far the strongest culture around maintaining trust in the enterprise space.
> Its a huge legal liability to have statements about how data won't be used and then use it, when you're a company that might compete in similar spaces, and Microsoft competes almost everywhere.
Almost everywhere in tech, but almost nowhere outside of tech. I work for a large non-tech conglomerate, and as far as I'm aware, we don't compete with any MS products/services.
This one hits the nail on the head, and the reason why not just Microsoft, but a lot of large software players are not incentivized to create better software.
At the end of the day, people like power, to make money, and the people at Microsoft are no exception. And businesses are businesses, enterprises to make money, not altruistic benefactors of humanity, or optimizers of a specific domain, like software. So what business will do are their original thing AND business tactics, and the larger the business, the more tactics they have to employ, otherwise they won't be as large, or even simply won't be, at all. So, on the top, it's all ruthless business tactics. As Microsoft is a large player for a long time, they have quite the rep sheet[0], but they are not unique in doing this. It's the name of the game.
This is the whole concept of market competition being a good thing for customers. Its also the thing that is hugely lacking in most major industry sectors because of decades of mergers and laws making it harder for new entries.
As you've pointed out, Microsoft will screw over customers the nanosecond it sees it can get away with it.
We were sold on (in my mid biz) Microsoft being all-the-things compliant: HIPAA, GDPR, etc.. and this is why we put all our data there. As long as they keep touting this, businesses will keep on feeding them data.
> Isn't this entire story about them disclosing this fact?
It seems to be, but they're claiming the details are confidential. It's rather confusing. I wonder whether Microsoft's intention was to prevent them from disclosing it altogether, or whether they just wanted to avoid the general details of the contract getting out (rather than this particular tidbit of info). I'm inclined to suspect it was the latter--just a general NDA. In any case, I don't like it.
> These giants, armed with nearly limitless funds and extensive client relationships, frequently abuse their advantage and bully smaller upstarts into oblivion.
I don’t really understand this viewpoint. Companies are _choosing_ to use Microsoft’s products for various reasons. Maybe they already use Office and the integration with Teams made Teams the best choice over Slack. Maybe the company had an existing relationship with Microsoft so onboarding Teams required less Administrative overhead. There are probably many more that I am not listing. These are legitimate reasons to choose a product over another, not Microsoft abusing its power.
Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem. Lone, un-integrated startups, like Slack, still pop up and shake up the market. Then big companies replicate their product and integrate it into their existing software suites and sales pipelines, providing value that the smaller startup cannot. In this case the smaller startup merged with a larger company and will likely be integrated with their systems, providing value that both companies could have easily created alone. This all seems like it’s working as intended to me.
Not really. It's more like they have an army of lawyers paid so they can claim GDPR compliance, and delay/suppress or negotiate deals for years (if not decades) anything that comes up to say their not.
That being said, apparently there are already ongoing legal cases around GDPR complaints for MS. No idea how those will end up.
> or when Microsoft hires erotic dancers for their events,
I worked at MS for a long time. I can say that sort of stuff hasn't happened for quite awhile, and people involved in it happening were fired, some of them rather publicly.
Now days, expense reports are gone over very carefully. Everyone at Microsoft attends yearly ethics training, which covers all manner of topics, including what is and is not acceptable to do to win sales.
Realistically, when it comes to cloud based productivity systems, the choices are Microsoft or Google.
> then the top executives with no technical knowledge are happy to sign multi-year contracts that lock them into those vendors
Any half decent company is going to have at least a CTO in charge of these decisions. The CTO should have multiple people working for them that are capable of making engineering decisions.
If a company sends a bunch of non-technical people to a technical presentation to make a technical decision, that is the company's fault.
> their reasoning was: Microsoft and Google are Billion dollar companies.
Did you ever see that written down. Or was it an assumption or rumour?
I ask because I specifically advise against that thinking and debunk
the "big company = trustworthy" fallacy. But what I find is that
actually there is appropriate low trust of US big-tech amongst the C
level, but they are compelled to use Microsoft or whatever for
non-technical/non-security reasons.
> IBM rules about confidentiality meant that some Microsoft employees were unable to talk to other Microsoft employees without a legal translator between them.
Haha, this is so ironic. I've worked on projects for MS that were just the same. We had to have code names for their code names and a code name for MS itself. Even our own code names had to be uttered with caution. Maybe they learned from IBM? Edit: Thinking about it some more, maybe they really did. None of the other big tech companies we did work for were that secretive.
> If you don't use any MS products or services, and no products/services you do use are backed by MS's services, then you don't need to care personally.
I beg to differ, wouldn't they be more inclined to care in case their data was being used in a product they do not interact with, rather than the one they do use - and in some way benefit from it?
> Having personally talked with Microsoft engineers who handle what this data is used for, I can tell you they take PII very seriously and per user details aren't being shared with 3rd parties (at present). Could they be misusing this? Or start selling it? Yes, but it would be an incredibly dumb idea from a brand value perspective, and I trust them to at least protect that. (I do honestly think that like most people, Microsoft employees are well-meaning individuals with good intentions)
Being an American company, you also have to worry about Microsoft being compelled to disclose per-user details with law enforcement or the intelligence community. They have no choice when it comes to this, so allowing them to have this data at all is dangerous.
That might be so for big companies. Most smaller shops more likely just accept the (still extremely detailed) T&C's outright. That certainly structures the relationship, but I doubt there's much balancing involved.
I'm thinking of e.g. the medical lab next door, the girlfriend's gynecologist, most smaller businesses really, of which there are a ton which deal with relatively sensitive customer data.
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