Here's your understanding. Maybe you don't work in the US, or come from the US, but are a microsoft employee. Maybe you you do not fully agree with the united

Here's your understanding. Maybe you don't work in the US, or come from the US, but are a microsoft employee. Maybe you you do not fully agree with the united states military policies or with their use of technology to further US military objectives and began working for Microsoft because, despite their flaws, you love tech and want to improve the world. Maybe you did not think, like the founding fathers did, that a standing army ought to be needed. Certainly, it's a new age and not every ideal is practical, nor what we think to be practical a good idea. Whatever the reason, you now have a conflict of interest; a change in the corporate mission statement and identity that is sudden and significant. Furthermore, suppose you do work on the Hololens project. You wake up in the morning to find out the knowledge in your head is now national-security critical, which means your head is now US Government property and you will be subject to a mandatory gook risk assessment. This will affect your ability to travel, send funds abroad, contact family abroad, whom you may be employed by, and all sorts of other requirements you did not sign up for upto and including special conditions delivered by the G-Men themselves to you and if you refuse you, like many others, may become a disappeared persons statistic. You did not apply for security clearance, and you have not been paid for the privilage. Perhaps you were a H1B working on that project who's H1B was ended by it. There's a long tradition of companies making a great consumer product, and the military hiring the willing staff or convincing the principal architect of the need, and making a great military weapon. What's going on here is people are being drafted. Good, creative IT people are hard to come by and they are pretty opinionated about not producing monstrosities because they are more capable than anyone of imagining how those weapons can be abused. Windows, Azure, and Office are all stagnating, dieing technologies at this point; Satya is looking for future revenue 5-10 years out. Microsoft has to play a certain amount of politics and be in the right circles to be allowed to do things like buy Github or Linkedin, both of which given their history of abusing labor they ought not to have been allowed to do. This problem is not something that is going to go away, and alienating your engineering staff is a great way to lose experienced, critical engineers to competitiors and even foreign governments. Satya is playing with fire.