I think that this was somewhat obvious to many in the last 10 years or so. There's no reason to fault them for that and, in all fairness, there are few corporate clients on here - or even online, considering Microsoft's market share for certain products and services - that complain about the quality of Microsoft's services and products.
What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.
At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.
As an enterprise admin of Microsoft services I think they're pretty mediocre. Their stuff is always behind the state of the art. It's just good enough to not go for a third party option that isn't included in their bundle pricing. But it never really satisfies, it's always got this 'make do' feeling about it.
The single pane of glass thing is nice but I don't think it's really something you can't do without. I think what really cements them in the enterprise market is their ability to deep discount their bundles.
It's very hard with third party vendors to compete with that. You're not gonna pay $10 per user per month for zoom or slack when you can have teams included in the bundle you're already paying, even if it's not quite as good.
It's like IKEA. It's cheap, it does the job and for that reason almost everyone has it, but I wouldn't call it quality.
Unsure why @Nathanf22's comment was downvoted to death. I would also suggest Lobste.rs and Reddit. But then again, RSS seems to work quite well in my case.
Probably because it seems AI-generated, and suggesting dev.to is in line with that - that place is actually an absolute cesspit of slop (SNR 1:100), as far as I have seen.
In the meantime I've bookmarked quite a few more on literature, politics, and such, if it's of any interest. I've also made (a fairly weak) case for Jacobin here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309069
Account created 16 hours ago, negative karma. Four comments fearmongering about brigading, praising Trump, Israel, right wing politics and one criticising Reddit for being leftist.
I know those pesky workers and people without capital are so annoying asking for Healthcare and consumer protections... I wish they just worked for the billionaire oligarchs without compliant.
Oh, it's even 'better' than that. To quote from an article in the Guardian:
It’s a short book but if you read it you’ll see that a decent editor could have got it down to one sentence. “When we seek to protect the vulnerable we limit the freedom of the rich and the privileged – and that is a disgrace.”
It’s a wretched read – a series of assertions and hunches freed from the chains of argument or evidence, with the intellectual rigour of a YouTube conspiracy rant. The prose occasionally soars to the level of clickbait, as in its most famous sentence: “The British are among the worst idlers in the world.” Most of its authors are now cabinet ministers in a government that no one would call exactly Stakhanovite.
To be fair they're ex cabinet ministers. The current shambles are Labour and that book was written by Tories. But you're correct that they weren't exactly Pick of the Bunch Tories, Liz Truss in particular has the unenviable distinction of having been Prime Minister for such a short period that a lettuce famously outlasted her.
Like someone mentioned already, it's a demonstration of power. But it goes well beyond that: it's about domination, discipline, constant monitoring, the reduction of individual agency, humiliation (you need permission for a basic human need) etc. The labour process theory says that that management systems are not only about coordinating work but about securing control over workers, that the drive for efficiency is also a drive for managerial control, including monopolising judgement and pacing work from above [0]
In many cases it's an intentional dehumanisation of the workers - they're seen as assets or numbers, as a type of machines that should be worked to their maximum physical and mental capacity and that are not owed any dignity [x], as if work is nothing more than mechanics. Foucault (in his "Discipline and Punish") speak about how disciplinary power produces "docile bodies" by making bodies more useful and easier to control, breaking functions and movements into optimised segments. [1] This is consistent with how the capitalist workplace normally operates, where employers want to control workers' time and actions, not just the finished product. We could see the toilet restriction just as an extreme, contemporary expression of the same thing. [2] For example, dodgy Amazon does that by making bathroom use hard and uses strict worker monitoring mainly as control/discipline thing, a sort of integrated control architecture (crazy pace + surveillance + comparison + dystopian ranking and whatnot) [3][6]
For all his faults, Heidegger's point (especially in his writing on technology) is relevant here, as he claims that modern systems tend to treat everything as a resource to be ordered, measured, and used. He says that things and people get turned into "standing-reserve" (basically stock to be managed) [4]
Many employers believe that loo breaks should happen in a workers' own time [5], which is both ridiculous and an shirking of responsibility towards society from businesses (which has always been the case).
What is certain is that this is certainly not as a serious productivity argument, despite what predatory companies like Amazon claim [z], because this kind of treatment can have (and often does, like the article shared above shows as well) severe consequences for health, dignity, and productivity. [7]
The fact that regulatory bodies like OSHA in the US, and especially in the EU, recognise the abuse pattern shows it's not just anecdote or rhetoric (like the Economist and similar papers often suggest), or that it applies to countries that aren't as developed as we like to think we are in the US and the UK, but a real issue that's rather common.
Not contradicting the second part, but I want to emphasise that they are different things. Slavery (and capitalism) can be extremely inefficient and simultaneously wildly profitable.
Precisely. There are even strong arguments to support this take; they speak about a "free market" that simply never existed, an "invisible hand" that supposedly beneficial, the ridiculous belief that competition always improves outcomes, the equation of price with value, the (HN favourite) that profit proves virtue / merit, consumer choice = freedom, and so, so many other unfounded or partially true beliefs.
The biggest subsidy is the supply of people, although these days much of those come from outside of the UK rather than other regions in the UK. Other places (and people in those places) bear the cost of making and raising the new people, and London (and other metros) gain the productivity from those new people.
Yeah, that is expected I speculate. Or maybe it isn't, depending of how one chooses to look at things. But it's not public subsidies, as it actually runs the highest surplus, both in absolute terms and per capita: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...
UK taxes are gathered centrally to London and then redistributed to the so called regions. The bulk of British government infrastructure is based in and around there, as is the BBC and a big chunk of royal spending (as royals and their employees live in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle (just outside London) for much of the year).
None of that will counted as "public subsidy" but collectively that will run into the billions. All those politicians, civil servants and BBC employees based there are spending UK public money to eat, sleep and travel within the city.
If a place like Liverpool had all that instead of London, then it would be Merseyside mysteriously generating a high surplus.
The biggest subsidy is the presence of government/civil service and royal "machinery", which ensures a steady flow of public money into the area before we even look at the vast amounts spent on London's infrastructure.
Much of British transport infrastructure is also designed to feed people into London (although London is less bad for that than Paris which is the hub of nearly all the French rail network.) The Channel Tunnel certainly does. Even the motorway and rail networks of Wales do to some extent.
Government and civil service departments are mostly based in and around London, as is most BBC infrastructure/HQ.
London has umpteen infrastructure updates whether motorways or underground lines. Also vanity projects such as the Garden Bridge which cost tens of millions without ever being built, or the Wembley Stadium refit which cost than the Scottish Parliament building (but garnered a fraction of the negative press.)
I believe London is one of the only parts of the UK that generates more tax revenue than it uses.
In general, denser cities are more efficient in very measure. It makes sense, you have the same amount of stuff with less space and less materials.
Basically everywhere the way it works is that the non-cities are on perpetual welfare from the cities because the cities have all the economy, but you still have to run miles of roads and sewage into the non-cities.
It generates more revenue because it is continually having infrastructure improvements, being boosted by the media and has numerous government departments etc based there.
The Garden Bridge project alone swallowed tens of millions and remained completely unbuilt. That money could have been better spent elsewhere with greater results.
It really couldn't have, because it's investment. The government invests in London because it has proven, and continues to prove, it pays off.
Yes it's true that the rest of the UK could benefit from more investment and that MIGHT make otherwise economically defunct areas slightly less economically defunct. Keyword might. London is a "will", not a might.
London has been getting inward investment for centuries, not just recently. Even today its prestige is partly from being a former imperial capital (like Vienna or Paris).
If you look at the geography of London it makes for a good port area for bringing goods to and from continental Europe, but it no longer does that like it used to. In the past it was highly dependent on coal from Yorkshire, South Wales etc and materials from elsewhere whether wool or metals. In the 1980s, the London stock market was bankrolled by North Sea oil, mostly in northern English and Scottish waters. Nowadays, London's chief thing is the finance industry and stock market, but that is not location dependent at all, and very easily transferred somewhere else which puts London in a more unsafe position than it realises. Like most major cities, it consumes a great deal of energy and gets its water from elsewhere (and some recycling).
It seems that you're framing it as if regulation is some random burden that appeared out of nowhere rather than a defence mechanism that emerged because businesses repeatedly abused workers, cut corners, and pushed costs onto everyone else whenever they were allowed to.
Work, technology, supply chains, data, health and safety, and the whole economy are all far more complex than they were in the 90s, of course regulation increased: we had to adjust to respond to the new challenges and everything else. It increased because the damage companies can do increased significantly too (we are literally discussing about existential threats to humanity and life on earth in the last few years), and because we learned again and again what happens when you leave everything to "the market" and trust firms to self-police.
Also, this idea that gig work is some balanced freedom on both sides sounds nice in theory but falls apart in practice. I'd go as far as saying that it's naive. The company/platform keeps the power, sets the terms, and the worker carries the instability and everything that derives from that. "You can sign up to multiple apps" is not a real solution to insecure income, it's just telling people to juggle several unreliable income streams at once and hope enough scraps appear each week. And whereas for businesses "losing" means lower profits or no profits (with the worst case scenario being that they have to shut down), for workers this can mean huge financial insecurity, depression, lack of control, and potential destitution. I'd say the latter is markedly more dramatic.
Put differently, it's not meaningful flexibility for most people, more like risk transfer. The business gets labour on demand without commitment, while the worker still has rent, bills, and food costs arriving on a fixed schedule and with the threat of actual death if they end up homeless in the winter.
And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms? If a company depends on labour to function, employing people properly is not some unfair punishment - it's part of the cost of doing business in a civilised society. The only reason private enterprise is tolerated at all is that it is supposed to produce a social benefit. If a business model only works by making workers permanently disposable and pushing insecurity onto society, then that is a criticism of the business model, not of regulation. And it's probably not worth keeping the private sector either.
>It seems that you're framing it as if regulation is some random burden that appeared out of nowhere rather than a defence mechanism that emerged because businesses repeatedly abused workers, cut corners, and pushed costs onto everyone else whenever they were allowed to.
They appeared because voters want low taxes and they want subsidies. It makes no sense to hold businesses (and buyers in general) responsible for a seller's well being. That should be the role of the government, who has the power to tax.
Holding businesses responsible is convenient for government leaders and the well connected, who can get away with corruption and the government leaders who can point fingers at others. And who is really going to have the manpower to audit all those buyers.
But of course, the voters want lower taxes now no matter what, so it is what it is.
This shifts the discussion elsewhere, but I'm happy to address the points you raised.
> [regulations] appeared because voters want low taxes and they want subsidies
Says who? If we move beyond opinion here, do we have something more to inform this conclusion? And how exactly do we connect the two here? - without more information it's a non sequitur situation.
I suggest that there are two separate things to look at here and we should not conflate them: tax politics (how states fund support) and labour law history (why employment protections exist).
On the first point, the claim that regulations appeared because voters want low taxes is wholly unsupported. It wouldn't make much sense either: regulations of all kinds existed long before democracy was a thing, as a general rule.
If we look at regulations pertaining to work in particular, labour law exists because the employment relationship has a built-in power imbalance and requires worker protection. It's really as straightforward as that. The ILO's Employment Relationship Recommendation [0] states explicitly that labour law seeks, among other things, to address "an unequal bargaining position" between parties, and it also notes problems caused when contractual arrangements deprive workers of protections or disguise the real employment relationship. It also says that national policy should clarify and adapt laws to guarantee effective protection and combat disguised employment relationships.
In fact, the ILO Constitution itself from 1919 says labour conditions involved "injustice, hardship and privation" on a scale that threatened social peace, and that improvement was urgently required through measures such as regulating hours, unemployment prevention, wage adequacy, protection against sickness/injury, protection of children, and freedom of association. That is a direct historical explanation of why labour regulation was institutionalised internationally.
Then you have the Treaty of Versailles [2] (the labour provisions) which explicitly state that labour should not be treated merely as a commodity, and list urgent principles including freedom of association and wages sufficient for a reasonable standard of life.
But the history of labour regulations is actually old, if you're into that. [3][4][5]
So let's put to rest the completely unfounded assumption that this is a tax-politics explanation and not a social-protection and industrial-order explanation.
> It makes no sense to hold businesses (and buyers in general) responsible for a seller's well being. That should be the role of the government, who has the power to tax.
Again, you misstate what labour regulation is for. Labour law does not generally make firms responsible for a worker's entire "wellbeing" in the abstract. It sets minimum rules inside a specific relationship the firm controls: wages, hours, safety, dismissal, status, notice, and similar conditions. The ILO framework is explicit that labour law exists because employment relationships involve unequal bargaining power and because protections are linked to the existence of that relationship, including where firms try to structure or disguise arrangements to avoid obligations. [0] Otherwise employment would pretty much be a form of slavery; favoured by employers, for sure, but an altogether shitty deal for the employees.
It is also historically (and morally, if you ask me) wrong to reduce this to tax-and-welfare politics. The foundational international labour-law texts explain the emergence of labour regulation in terms of "injustice, hardship and privation," social instability, and the need for social justice, so not as a response to voter demand for low taxes. The ILO Constitution and related early labour principles are very clear on this. [6]
> Holding businesses responsible is convenient for government leaders and the well connected, who can get away with corruption and the government leaders who can point fingers at others.
This is simply no evidence to support this. It's a simplistic comment about political incentives, not a demonstrated explanation of why labour rules exist, why they are wrong etc. Corruption can exist in any regulatory domain, but that does not establish that employer duties are conceptually invalid. At best, we could frame it as an argument about enforcement quality and governance integrity, but it wouldn't refute the underlying rationale for labour standards (power imbalance and prevention of harm in employment relationships).
I should have specified the regulation I was referring to is related to things like being able to let go of employees or pay for them while unemployed or cash when they are retired, etc.
I did not intend to wrap in stuff like minimum ages, maximum hours without supplemental pay, discrimination, sexual harassment, safety, or other quality of life related labor laws.
Only the laws related to the business interaction a labor selling choosing to sell their labor, and a labor buyer choosing to buy labor. It should be as easy as possible, if the goal is to have an efficient market. Which is not antithetical to the goal of also having a society that provides a minimum quality of life.
>This is simply no evidence to support this. It's a simplistic comment about political incentives, not a demonstrated explanation of why labour rules exist, why they are wrong etc.
My evidence is the ever increasing push for "privatization" and loans instead of subsidies. And voters support it, especially in the US. But I believe it is like that in the UK also. For example, I think the UK has reduced its higher education subsidies so that now 18 year olds in the UK also take out student loans, at least borrow much more than before.
Instead of giving people cash to buy homes (which would increase taxes because that cash has to be accounted for), the voters opt to give people loans underwritten by future taxpayers.
And the underlying dynamic of this is that as a society's median age gets higher and higher, it needs to squeeze its young more and more to deliver on the benefits to its largest and most reliable voting bloc, the old and soon to be old.
> It should be as easy as possible, if the goal is to have an efficient market.
I'd argue that the goal was never to just have an efficient market, for there's absolutely no reason to have a market to begin with, unless society at large benefits from it (not just the employers and the employees, since they don't exist and operate in isolation). The employees, who are real people rather than - or before they are - legal entities, absolutely need protecting. Their bodies can break, their time is limited, and they have tangible and intangible needs that have existed before - and will exist after - businesses were a thing. But once we've adopted this economic model, market efficiency is certainly an aspect to it, agreed. However, it still can't be the most important factor or even one more important than individual rights and their wellbeing.
As such, I'd agree that selling one's own services/skill (labour) should generally be easy, but a fairly long list of failsafes is still unavoidable and necessary simply because businesses are predatory entities by their very nature (a necessary evil, it could be argued), especially after the onset of neoliberalism in the 80s, and there's an inherent imbalance of bargaining power between employers and employees. [0][1][2][3]
Labour is not just a market commodity because the seller is a person embedded in family/community. So I am all for giving employees (but not employers) more control over this relationship (selling labour) for multiple reasons, the two most important being that this is inherently good for democracy and also because what's good for workers/citizens may legitimately override narrow "economic efficiency" metrics. [4][5]
> My evidence is the ever increasing push for "privatization" and loans instead of subsidies. And voters support it, especially in the US. But I believe it is like that in the UK also. For example, I think the UK has reduced its higher education subsidies so that now 18 year olds in the UK also take out student loans, at least borrow much more than before.
I am fairly sure that this push doesn't come from citizens/workers, but from the private business sector, which has all but accaparated the political power in the US and other countries, UK being the closest in terms of mentality and approach (think Thatcher & Reagan). US can now be considered without any exaggeration an oligarchy. It is more or less a consensus among economists and historians that privatisation generally works against the best interest of the citizen and very much to the interest of the wealthy and the business class. [6][7][8][9]
The privatisation of public services and the other mechanisms that you mention have had undeniably negative effects on citizens and workers, and it was very much not a choice they made, but it was forced upon them. US and the UK have been the only two countries that have embraced neoliberalism so fast, blindly, and without guardrails, and it definitely shows. [10][11][12][13][14]
> And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms
Firms are just other people. They take on more and more risk. These days in the UK HR departments they often say you can't let someone go even in their probation period. Think how a experimental and risky a hire is, and how easy it is to quit a job that might not be any good vs how hard it is to get rid of an employee who isn't any good.
Firms aren't people. They are artificial constructs that we invented to solve an organizational issue a long time ago. Some aspects of natural persons were emulated in corporation law, but a lot of them aren't:
- Firms can't go to jail
- Firms don't naturally pass away
- They have their own taxation
- They can be in more than one jurisdiction at once
- There's more than one type of corporate entity.
It's just a matter of taking the right decisions regarding what rules we think are useful to society.
> Firms are just other people. They take on more and more risk.
I have to disagree with that, I think it's a very American interpretation on the situation.
A business is an organised legal/economic entity with capital, reserves, insurance, legal advice, hiring processes, and the ability to spread risk across many workers and time periods. It can come into (legal) existence and dissolve without anyone automatically becoming destitute or actually dying. In contrast, a worker has but one body, real health to care for, and far less financial buffer. I think that equating businesses and people not only hides the actual power imbalance, but ignores how reality works.
In terms of risks, sure, hiring involves uncertainty, of the financial order, not a life-or-death kind of thing. And it doesn't justify transferring the cost of that uncertainty onto the least protected party. Like I say above, we allow businesses to operate on the premise that the society benefits from their activities; there are risks associated with running businesses, but there's no point to have them if society stands more to lose than to gain by having them. No one is forcing businesses to ever increase their profits (and shift the risks) once they become stable, but it would be hard to argue that people can afford not eating, having a place to live in, or stop rearing children. We simply can't conflate these two entities here and blur the line between life ontology and legal (that is, made up) concepts.
The risk to the employer is that a bad hire can cost money, time, management effort. To the worker that can mean arrears, debt, eviction risk, food insecurity, etc., including death. In fact the very idea of labour law emerged on the basis of unequal bargaining power, which makes "freedom of contract" a fiction in many cases.
As for probation, from what I know is mostly a contractual/process tool in UK practice, not a magic legal lock-in. ACAS guidance does not say "you cannot dismiss in probation"; it says employers should have a valid reason and follow a fair procedure: https://www.acas.org.uk/dismissals
I see no reason to assume that a business model is entitled to be low-commitment; if it depends on labour, then the cost of employing people decently is part of the model. They are forced to accept it in order to be allowed to operate in society. Conversely, if the model only works by making labour disposable, that in itself works as evidence against the model, not against protections.
We should also try not to fall for the false symmetry between quitting and firing, in my view, because "easy to quit" is irrelevant to whether employers should have obligations or not. For the worker quitting a bad job still bears real costs (income gap, search time, stress, potential destitution), whereas when the employer fires someone it continues to retain the enterprise, assets, and ongoing revenue capacity.
In large companies, especially those which do not depend on especially talented or specialised workers, HR is very much just a "people risk" department. People are an input, with them comes some risk, like tonnes of coal which might cause pollution, or sacks of ingredients which might go off and poison customers. Over many years I have come to understand this is how BigCo HR operates.
The risks might be different, they might be a bully, they might do bad work, they might be dishonest, or even just screw up (honestly) when under pressure, it's all risk to HR. I decided not to be an employee of such companies 20+ years ago, although I am not in the "commodity employee" set.
Colour me sceptical. At the moment you have no protection from unfair dismissal until you have been employed for two years. The change to six months doesn't start until next January.
They might not be lying, they could also be stupid. It's the same way in the US. There's a mass delusion among people that firing workers is hard.
Um... no it isn't. Most states are right to work. No, you don't need to give severance. No, you don't need to announce it. And yes, that's all perfectly legal.
Is there a theoretical risk that an employee can try to sue you and burn a bunch of your money? Yes, but that risk always exists. Someone could try to sue you always, doesn't mean they'll win.
In actuality the risk is so incredibly small it's not worth thinking about.
What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.
At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.
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