3 ms·

Trust doesn’t mean I think they’re angels. I think MS is an awful company that tries to win by destroying the competition using all sorts of legal and illegal

Trust doesn’t mean I think they’re angels. I think MS is an awful company that tries to win by destroying the competition using all sorts of legal and illegal tricks to do so. At the same time, it MS starts a new product, I would trust them to support it for a reasonable amount of time and give a reasonable amount of transition time if they did decide to wind it down based entirely on their history. OTOH, 4 years ago I thought that Google was a much better supporter of Open Source but even then I wouldn’t trust them enough to not sunset a new product with months of notice at best to actually use something new they came up with.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
"On the side of the angels" !== "angels". Just means tending to have the right motives. But at any rate the hosted product and the open source code are orthogonal, right? You can't use one to guide your opinion of the other. This is the point I am making: we are interchangeable consumers, and yet we invest emotional energy in the pretence that we are not. Nobody in their right mind would believe that Coca-Cola would prefer you on some emotional level not to be a Pepsi drinker. And yet we, as consumers, allow brand interpretations (Coca-Cola is classic and Christmas, Pepsi's logo looks like an obese person's belly) to gain emotional strength; we extend our personal identities with brand loyalty. I am slightly late to this party; I perhaps used to think that brand loyalty in customers was something that was meaningfully measured and acted on, and I suspect until the mid-eighties it was, to some extent. But companies are beholden so completely to the whims of their shareholders, or worse their private equity owners, that it's impossible to believe that the continued happiness of customers matters much. (Nothing to me underscores this more than people overexerting themselves to find positive things to say about Apple's Vision Pro launch, which was so terrifyingly dystopian and anti-human that it made me feel physically sick as a long-term Apple customer, and yet I type this on a Macbook that I would generally say is an object I emotionally value using!)
midoridensha 3y ago
This just tells me that Google is by far the more trustworthy company. You don't have to worry much about them trying to destroy all the competition, and thus removing your choices. The key to Google is to simply not trust that their non-core products will actually last.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

"On the side of the angels" !== "angels". Just means tending to have the right motives. But at any rate the hosted product and the open source code are orthogonal, right? You can't use one to guide your opinion of the other. This is the point I am making: we are interchangeable consumers, and yet we invest emotional energy in the pretence that we are not. Nobody in their right mind would believe that Coca-Cola would prefer you on some emotional level not to be a Pepsi drinker. And yet we, as consumers, allow brand interpretations (Coca-Cola is classic and Christmas, Pepsi's logo looks like an obese person's belly) to gain emotional strength; we extend our personal identities with brand loyalty. I am slightly late to this party; I perhaps used to think that brand loyalty in customers was something that was meaningfully measured and acted on, and I suspect until the mid-eighties it was, to some extent. But companies are beholden so completely to the whims of their shareholders, or worse their private equity owners, that it's impossible to believe that the continued happiness of customers matters much. (Nothing to me underscores this more than people overexerting themselves to find positive things to say about Apple's Vision Pro launch, which was so terrifyingly dystopian and anti-human that it made me feel physically sick as a long-term Apple customer, and yet I type this on a Macbook that I would generally say is an object I emotionally value using!)

midoridensha 3y ago

This just tells me that Google is by far the more trustworthy company. You don't have to worry much about them trying to destroy all the competition, and thus removing your choices. The key to Google is to simply not trust that their non-core products will actually last.