What concerns me is that Project Nimbus is a public project that is still actively being enabled by Google and Amazon. Secret projects are one thing, but largely meaningless, because companies, people and governments have shown they don't even care when they're in the open.
As someone who's been boycotting Microsoft in line with the BDS movement, I welcome this (belated) move, but seeing Bill Gates on stage laughing (maybe nervously) at Ibtihal Aboussad's (now validated) protest still makes me uneasy about a guy who I previously followed and liked to a reasonable extent, and I'll still probably hold off on watching his most recent documentaries. It makes me wonder how comfortable you have to be (as a supposed philanthropist, no less) with the deaths of tens of thousands of brown kids to laugh in a situation like that. Hell, even Ballmer had the sense to keep a straight face.
> how comfortable you have to be (as a supposed philanthropist, no less) with the deaths of tens of thousands of brown kids to laugh in a situation like that
Laughing at someone yelling on stage can be entirely orthogonal to what they’re saying. (And it’s not like that outburst did anything.)
The article you're commenting on quite literally mentions that employee pressure, of which Ibtihal Aboussad's was the most vocal and memorable in the media, played a significant role in the decision.
> article you're commenting on quite literally mentions that employee pressure
Fair enough. I’m not buying it—the timeline doesn’t work, and the broader literature on disruptive protest is mixed, leaning towards negative.
What clearly swung the odds was the Guardian reporting on the frankly brazen meetings Microsoft executives decided to take. Without that reporting, this wouldn't have happened. With that reporting and absent the employee protests, this would have still likely happened.
Does that "literature" include history itself? I can't think of a single movement for good in history that accomplished its goals without pissing people off. Resisting any form of power tends to result in that power - and the many supporting it - getting quite upset by definition.
> can't think of a single movement for good in history that accomplished its goals without pissing people off
Disruptive protest takes the form of interrupting ordinary peoples' lives. (In contrast with targeted protest, which seeks to directly disrupt the problematic conduct.)
They are effective at raising awareness of an issue and rallying the base. Among those who are already aware and have not yet committed to a side, however, they tend (broadly) to decrease sympathy.
> Resisting any form of power tends to result in that power - and the many supporting it - getting quite upset by definition
Of course. I'm talking about broader views.
Sympathy for Israel went up after the Columbia protests because (a) nobody was surprised that there was a war in Gaza and (b) folks breaking into a building and disrupting public spaces doesn't naturally elicit sympathy from undecideds. (It also crowds out coverage of the actual war.)
I'm not sure you know what "beyond the pale" means. You probably shouldn't look into the history of the suffragette or civil rights movements, for your own sanity.
Not just some people - a lot of people, and an increasing amount of people in the last year or so, including whole countries like Ireland, Spain and Slovenia. See the BDS movement/website/Facebook pages. As a lifelong Windows user I've been seriously considering moving to a Linux distro for my next desktop. I'll need to dig into the news some more, but this decision more than likely means I can stick with Windows.
In other comments replying to another user you dismissed "criticisms from the 90s", but I think that's not entirely justified. If the bad things they did in the 90s are still having bad effects today, and they built their success on those bad things, then it's not really enough just to stop doing them; they would need to actively try to right those past wrongs.
However, even in the present, the increasing intrusiveness of their update schemes, forcing people to have a Microsoft account even to install Windows, shoving AI into people's faces at every opportunity, etc., would all count as reasons I think they are bad. Also I tend to think in general that simply existing as a giant corporation with large market share is bad.
To be clear, I also think that Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., are also very very bad. I think I'd agree that these days Microsoft is on the lower end of badness among these megacorps. However, that's partly just because it's become somewhat weaker than it was at the height of its badness. You could argue that this isn't "badness" but something like "ability to implement badness" but I see those as pretty closely tied. Basically the bigger a corporation becomes, the harder it has to work to avoid being bad.
Their laziness, greed and business acumen have left us in the position that the world's dominant personal OS is insecure, unreliable and running a protection racket with virus detection (and virus writers)
This is an ongoing rolling clusterfuck, and is entirely due to MS
So the criticisms from the 90s that I mentioned in my other comment? Yeah, I prefer to live in the modern world. It isn't Microsoft that needs to be hit with antitrusts in 2025. It's Apple and Google. Live moves on, and in 2025, Microsoft is one of the more ethical tech companies around, unless you're one of the many sheltered people in tech that think targeted advertising is manifest evil that's on par with enabling a genocide.
I'm 40. For me, the modern world didn't just start in 2019. And the list is additive. The fact that Microsoft has been on it since the 90s doesn't stop me from also listing Google, Apple, and Amazon.
Modern by definition means the modern day, I'm not sure what 2019 was but we don't get to redefine terms for our own use. The list is only "additive" if the criticisms still apply. Your presumably best example was a corporate strategy from the 90s. Companies, just like (most) people, change. 2025 Microsoft is pro-Linux and a much better force for good than most other tech companies, yet almost invariably I find the people triggered by the mention of Microsoft tend to be relatively quiet about and/or active consumers of Apple, Amazon, Google et al.
I think you're selling this too far with "one of the more ethical tech companies around" and "a force for good". You'll have to clarify what exactly that comparison is based on.
I'm not a total fan of Apple here but it's weird to contrast them with Apple in this case when they don't enable a genocide (having a closed ecosystem is a UX decision compared to genocide). You mention that Microsoft is now "pro-Linux", but if that's your measure, many other tech companies contribute significantly more to the Linux kernel.
https://lwn.net/Articles/1031161/
With respect to anti-trust, some of their bundling decisions absolutely deserve to be scrutinized (e.g. Teams).
Furthermore, Microsoft is still doing business with the IDF. If your bar is "enabling a genocide" (presumably by being in contract with the IDF), I don't think that's changed too much, just the most egregious example of cloud services in service of that are being challenged (Unit 8200 stuff). It looks like that work is now moving the AWS though.
You're right, I was operating on the assumption this was the last of their ties before I'd properly read the article and looked into the issue, unfortunately it looks like it's still on the boycott list until they actually divest from Israeli military at the least. Apple is therefore not as unethical as the genocide-enabling companies (and isn't one of them to the best of my knowledge), but it's still far more unethical than most people in tech tend to acknowledge - their pricing practices are akin to price-gouging, including 2-3x markup on like-for-like hardware and locking you into their own accessories before the EU forced them to standardise, and the whole "walled garden" ecosystem was never anything but an excuse to limit what consumers can do with their software/hardware. They almost single-handedly raised the prices of mobile phones for the vast majority of people because other manufacturers saw what their consumers were letting them get away with. And that's before we even get started on the sweatshops.
Well, to their credit, they've also seen that IBM, Volkswagen and Ford were still allowed to do plenty of business with no repercussions whatsoever (that I know of).
No, it isn't ignorant, it's history, and pointing to other historical examples of colonialism and imperialism doesn't make modern colonialist states legitimate. Romans lived in the UK over a thousand years ago, but that wouldn't give their descendants in modern Italians the right to occupy the UK, and us native Brits would be well within our right to fight back any invading and occupying force whether the invading and occupying force likes it or not. Muslims, Jews and Christians lived in relative peace in Palestine for almost a thousand years before the British put Israel there.
The British not only didn't put Israel there, they actually fought against the Jews and supported the Arab armies in 1948, after previously restricting Jewish migration during the Holocaust (contributing to many Jewish deaths). Modern Zionism began 30 years before the Brits took control.
"Squeezed"? I think you mean invited. Assuming you're not being disingenuous, which is unlikely given your other comments and clear hate for Palestinians, maybe you should look at the One Million Plan and the many similar movements by Israel to import tens of millions of Jews into the area since 1948, and the many atrocities like Deir Yassin that forced Palestinians out. Israel has been a long time in the making, since the time of the Irgun and Haganah at least, and none of the current situation is accidental.
Why would anyone in Palestine, including Gaza, care about helping the people who have occupied them since 1948, with the help of the Brits and funding of the US?
No, it's just been so isolated that only Israel can control who and what goes in and out, to the point NGOs have described it for decades as the world's biggest open air concentration camp. I don't condone the horrible things Hamas did (that were actually proven and not later disproven hasbara, like the rapes), but I'm also not arrogant enough to tell an occupied people how they should be resisting their occupiers, especially when the target is a military outpost (which is essentially what the kibbutz was) mere miles from Gaza and being used as a base largely by standing members of the IDF and their families (i.e. the occupying force). Desperate people take desperate measures, who knew? The Irgun and Haganah probably should have thought about that before they violently persuaded the British into giving them a "homeland" that already had a people - including Jews and Christians - living in relative peace on it for almost a thousand years.
They don't actively civilian deaths, they just don't particularly care about them for pragmatic reasons, because killing a million people is much less plausibly denial genocide that wouldn't fulfil the former conspiracy theory and now publicly-stated gaol of Netanyahu to subsume Gaza into the rest of former Palestine. Is that not enough evidence for you? Besides that, if you truly believe Israel's version of events that at least 30,000 of those people were "militants" (the ANC and Viet Cong were also militants and terrorists), do you really believe it's possible to get a ~50% collateral damage rate when you care about innocent civilians? Also, the 60K figure has been stuck there for a long time in an ongoing genocide and famine. Once the dust settles and Israel has let the UN in, that figure will go up by a factor of at least two or three.
> do you really believe it's possible to get a ~50% collateral damage rate when you care about innocent civilians?
You should look up civilian death rate in previous wars, even recent ones. Civilian deaths typically outnumber combatant deaths by a factor of at least 2:1, often more like 6:1, and sometimes more.
