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Disagree. The lack of any real contrition — let alone accountability for those responsible — makes me suspect that they consider this a PR blunder, not an ethic

Disagree. The lack of any real contrition — let alone accountability for those responsible — makes me suspect that they consider this a PR blunder, not an ethics blunder. They'll readily build something similar in the future if they think they can get away with it.

colechristensen 6y ago
And if there was, the criticism would be that a fall guy took the blame. Failures shouldn’t lead to people falling on their swords to please the public. When you make that the response, people don’t learn to not make mistakes, they learn to hide them, deny them, and shift blame.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  This wasn’t a “mistake”, like pushing a bug to production. It was intentional. Product managers drew up a spec for the feature. Designers designed it. Engineers built it. Technical writers wrote documentation for it. Marketers promoted it. In all likelihood, the VP writing the statement knew about it as well. Plenty of people had meetings and thought about and discussed exactly what the feature was going to do. The failure we’re talking about is an organizational failure. For whatever reason, whole teams of people at Microsoft proactively decided to build a workplace surveillance tool. Microsoft can’t fix that by making small changes to what they’ve already built to appease the public. They have to change the organization so that it doesn’t happen again.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    >whatever reason, whole teams of people at Microsoft proactively decided to build a workplace surveillance tool. Maybe the reason was nostalgia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    "The failure we’re talking about is an organizational failure." As much as I despise Microsoft, this is more of an industry and even a societal failure. Taking a look at the exploitative, surveillance society we've built, it's clear that ethics are just not very important in tech, nor in business as a whole. Many of HN's readers who are now wagging their fingers at MS are probably working at companies that also spy on their users, and they either look the other way as long as they get a nice fat paycheck, don't think about it at all, or excuse it in some way. Privacy-violating sites and software don't build themselves, and there's no shortage of them in today's internet.
UnFleshedOne 6y ago
This is true of all ethics blunders no matter how groveling a PR piece sounds.
crazygringo 6y ago
On the other hand, what does "real contrition" even mean for a corporation? A corporation isn't a person. Decisions are made by 100's or 1,000's of individual managers, each of whom join and leave over the years. CEO's enter and leave. Board membership changes. Accountability comes from people not buying a product. Or from a government fining them $$$$. I'd ask you, why do you think a voluntary statement of "contrition" from one of a corporation's single employees means anything at all? (I'm playing a little bit devil's advocate here, but I think it's worth remembering that corporations aren't people and shouldn't be treated as such.)

colechristensen 6y ago

And if there was, the criticism would be that a fall guy took the blame. Failures shouldn’t lead to people falling on their swords to please the public. When you make that the response, people don’t learn to not make mistakes, they learn to hide them, deny them, and shift blame.

jakelazaroff 6y ago
This wasn’t a “mistake”, like pushing a bug to production. It was intentional. Product managers drew up a spec for the feature. Designers designed it. Engineers built it. Technical writers wrote documentation for it. Marketers promoted it. In all likelihood, the VP writing the statement knew about it as well. Plenty of people had meetings and thought about and discussed exactly what the feature was going to do. The failure we’re talking about is an organizational failure. For whatever reason, whole teams of people at Microsoft proactively decided to build a workplace surveillance tool. Microsoft can’t fix that by making small changes to what they’ve already built to appease the public. They have to change the organization so that it doesn’t happen again.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  >whatever reason, whole teams of people at Microsoft proactively decided to build a workplace surveillance tool. Maybe the reason was nostalgia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "The failure we’re talking about is an organizational failure." As much as I despise Microsoft, this is more of an industry and even a societal failure. Taking a look at the exploitative, surveillance society we've built, it's clear that ethics are just not very important in tech, nor in business as a whole. Many of HN's readers who are now wagging their fingers at MS are probably working at companies that also spy on their users, and they either look the other way as long as they get a nice fat paycheck, don't think about it at all, or excuse it in some way. Privacy-violating sites and software don't build themselves, and there's no shortage of them in today's internet.

UnFleshedOne 6y ago

This is true of all ethics blunders no matter how groveling a PR piece sounds.

crazygringo 6y ago

On the other hand, what does "real contrition" even mean for a corporation? A corporation isn't a person. Decisions are made by 100's or 1,000's of individual managers, each of whom join and leave over the years. CEO's enter and leave. Board membership changes. Accountability comes from people not buying a product. Or from a government fining them $$$$. I'd ask you, why do you think a voluntary statement of "contrition" from one of a corporation's single employees means anything at all? (I'm playing a little bit devil's advocate here, but I think it's worth remembering that corporations aren't people and shouldn't be treated as such.)