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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

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.