5 ms·

Obviously MS does some great things but I wonder what do you think about their culture? MS is trying to make me use Edge Browser by randomly refusing to let me

by mrtksn 3y ago

Obviously MS does some great things but I wonder what do you think about their culture? MS is trying to make me use Edge Browser by randomly refusing to let me use Bing chat in any other browser. This makes me think that MS is still evil and will force me to do things the moment they can. I gave up Bing Chat because of this and was using Perplexity.ai instead, until Bing got integrated into ChatGPT. Another thing is the feel of the MS products is very different than OpenAI. For example, Bing chat again, would have a strange UX where it counts down my message allowance on the topic as I keep asking follow up questions as if it was designed for their convenience and not mine. OpenAI products on the other hand feel much more pleasant to use and don't stress me out even when things don't work as expected, which makes me think that the approach of product design is very different than MS. Same tech running on the Azure servers, completely different product experiences. IMHO this points to completely different mindsets.

staunton 3y ago
> MS is still evil All big corporations are "evil", as in, their decisionmaking is scaled and institutionalized enough to effectively implement the goal of "maximizing shareholder value" above what's good for you or society.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  No, not all companies try to exploit their strength in one area to make me use some other product that I have no interest in. I'm not talking about "hey, we have this product that you might like", I'm talking about "if you want to use this product, you must also use this product". There's also no technical reason for it, sometimes they will let me use it. Not O.K.
  - kbenson 3y ago
    > No, not all companies try to exploit their strength in one area to make me use some other product that I have no interest in. I'm not sure of any large one that doesn't. The incentives are aligned such that it's hard for them not to. It's easy to find examples of similar (sometimes almost identical) behavior from most large companies.
    - mrtksn 3y ago
      Okay, what other company does it? You may say Apple & App Store but that's not the same.
      - tymekpavel 3y ago
        Apple/iMessage/Safari Google/Android/Chrome/YouTube Meta/Messenger/Facebook/WhatsApp ...just to name a few.
        jrockway 3y ago
        I don't know if Safari is that important to Apple. I have the enhanced data security feature of iCloud turned on, and I can still access my stuff in Chrome on the iCloud web interface (via the auth flow on my phone). It's actually exceedingly well-thought out and a nice bone to throw to Windows users that otherwise use Apple stuff! They could have been Safari-only or Mac-only, but aren't, even for super niche features.
        makingstuffs 3y ago
        You don’t need to use any of Facebook’s other platforms to use WhatsApp. I’ve not had a Facebook account for nigh on a decade but use WhatsApp as my main messaging app.
      - kbenson 3y ago
        Apple with iMessage onthe iPhone is about as similar as you can get, and was actually at the forefront of my mind when I wrong my comment. It's a chat platform that you have to use their product to be able to utilize.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Name one company of any size that isn’t doing the same thing?
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Valve's a great example. They have overwhelming market share and could have long since tried to tighten the screws to make a buck, and haven't done anything of the sort. They've also launched numerous 1st party systems and hardware that they could have tried to shove on people (Steamdeck, Index, controllers, etc) but, again, have done nothing of the sort.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        Valve is worth around 7.7 billion and from the best I can find, it doesn’t have a quarter of the gaming market. How much power could they yield
        somenameforme 3y ago
        That figure is quite ridiculous. Even if one completely ignores Steam and all of their games/products, even CS:GO alone is worth billions by itself, with millions of concurrent players (and growing) more than a decade after its launch! All that said, I would expect Valve's total immediate-term 'worth' to be much less than it could be, which is the entire point of this topic. The reason companies treat their customers poorly is because it's profitable, but it also has consequences. You see large short to mid term growth in exchange for long term failure. That's why I think it's more typical to see public companies treat their customers poorly than it is for private companies. Generally the "employees" (including board and CEO) of a public company are evaluated on their short to mid-term performance. By contrast private companies, especially ones that remain private long beyond the point of being able to 'cash out' with a public offering, tend to be more focused on the long term viability. So it's expected that their 'value', whatever it may be, would be less than it would be if they acted in a hostile fashion to their users.
        3y ago
- osigurdson 3y ago
  What organizations are interested are interested in “what is good for you or society”? Even if they start out that way, eventually corruption sets in. I’d rather have companies have a clear profit motive instead of a series of fake motives and increased regulatory capture.
scarface_74 3y ago
Open AI doesn’t have any meaningful “products” they have good technology and they charge $20 a month for a subscription to a technology demo that doesn’t come close to covering their costs. You think the employees at “Open” AI care about anything more than their large paychecks no matter what they say?
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  It is implied in OP's reply too, right? No word about 'hey we're giving powerful tech to a hyper-monopolist', it's only about your friends and the money
- lumost 3y ago
  I’d be curious if $20/mo is or is not enough to cover their costs. It’s opaque what their inference setup is, or what the final economics of LLMs will be. With 30-100 Billion param models becoming available which are in spitting distance of gpt-4, and dedicated ASIC implementations… openAI might be charging too much.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Are you taking into account they are also paying far below market costs for compute or even what a large customer could negotiate?
    - Grimblewald 3y ago
      So because their costs are lower than that of competitors, customers should pay more? Ok.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        There costs are lower…for now. Do you think Microsoft is going to subsidize them forever?
        lumost 3y ago
jrockway 3y ago
I don't think any of that really affects the day-to-day at OpenAI if they got bought. There are plenty of counter-examples for forcing you to use Edge or ads in the Start menu. They made Typescript. They made VS Code. Those teams are just doing their thing, and it's very likely that OpenAI would be like that. Microsoft is past the world of "everyone must use our browser and OS", they really just want to sell any of their products if you'll buy them. Like, I use Outlook on my iPhone because my organization uses Office 365. That would have been unheard of a couple decades ago; Outlook and Windows was their moneymaker and if you wanted one you got both. But now, it's just teams doing their own thing. The likely effect on day-to-day for OpenAI would have been a different promotion process, their stock being worth $0, and having to use a different videoconferencing solution. I worked at a startup that got bought by a huge company, and that's basically all that changed for us. Our team continues to work on our product, and I'm only vaguely aware of what the rest of the company even does. (I think they make servers? Like solder together chips and put them in the box.) Day-to-day doesn't change much; it's the same people, the same code, and the same goals. I didn't get bought by Microsoft, but I can't imagine that these strategic acquisitions are much different across the Fortune 500.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > Microsoft is past the world of "everyone must use our browser and OS" OS maybe but browser? They're going to great lengths to push Edge. Including harassing customers trying to download Chrome or Firefox.
  - bdavbdav 3y ago
    Yeah I don’t think that’s true at all. It’s a minor nightmare as well in an enterprise setting trying to lock down their attempts to change defaults, push copilot, lock down office smart services etc.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Yes it's a game of whack-a-mole. Even though they are in fact considering the enterprise market as a key customer. I used to manage Apple devices (iPhone but also Mac which was much more work) for a long time and that was much harder. For example, for a federated Apple ID you can still, after 5 years since release, not use federated Apple IDs if your Azure AD UPN and E-mail are not the same. In like 90% of enterprises this is not the case but they just won't fix this. Apple thinks we should just change our entire org for them. Well with Macs taking up 0,5% of our installed base that's just not going to happen (and this way it's not going to be much higher either). Not to mention all the terrible Mac ports of windows software like VPN, Security etc that don't follow Mac concepts or installers. You have to pile workaround upon workaround.
anuraaga 3y ago
I suspect many developers, including OpenAI engineers are using VSCode, maybe TypeScript for frontend engineers, GitHub for sure which had no real features like pull request approvers before Microsoft money came in. Less at OpenAI most likely, but C# and .NET are going strong with bleeding edge tech like .NET chisel containers support. And I've seen great support from their engineers working on OSS, best of FAANG. Google created the meme that a company could be evil or not but we're past that age. Let's focus on the experiences, and while not forgetting the past (yes the 90s do not paint MS well), be forgiving. MS seems to continue to develop and even innovate on a lot of this tech, painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous. Yes as with any large company, there will be parts that are good and parts that are not. Disclaimer: I have never worked at Microsoft and own no stock directly though so have ETFs. And through OSS I have some friends there that I strongly respect and think are awesome and always think of them any time I see hate talk towards MS, which is unfortunately common...
- devjab 3y ago
  Most of OpenAIs tech stack is AI toolage, but basically everything you interact with is written in Python. Nobody uses C# for anything serious, because why would you? It’s not a bad language, it’s just not a very good language either. Need efficiency? Rust/C++. Need an all round language? Node or Python, which are less efficient, but still powerful enough to power Instagram and well OpenAI as far as Python goes and LEGO as far as Typescript goes. Realistically you’re looking to choose between C#, Java and Go. Both Java and Go are miles ahead of C# in terms of concurrency, I mean, C# is still stuck with “await” after all, and while I guess you can have a lengthy debate on C# vs Java, 9 gazillion large companies use Java while 0 use C#. It’s not that C# is bad, like I said. It’s never really been better than it is now, it’s more a question of why would you ever use it? Even the C# developers at Microsoft admit to prototyping using Python because it’s just so much faster to build things with it, and while they do move things to C#, you have to wonder if they would if they weren’t working for Microsoft.
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  > painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous. Hard to understand this point of view with: - vscode being "open source", conveniently leaving out flagship features like live share and Python extension - Increase of "in your face, fuck you" dark patterns like forcing an account for Windows setup, forcing ms authenticator, etc

by mrtksn 3y ago

staunton 3y ago

> MS is still evil All big corporations are "evil", as in, their decisionmaking is scaled and institutionalized enough to effectively implement the goal of "maximizing shareholder value" above what's good for you or society.

mrtksn 3y ago
No, not all companies try to exploit their strength in one area to make me use some other product that I have no interest in. I'm not talking about "hey, we have this product that you might like", I'm talking about "if you want to use this product, you must also use this product". There's also no technical reason for it, sometimes they will let me use it. Not O.K.
- kbenson 3y ago
  > No, not all companies try to exploit their strength in one area to make me use some other product that I have no interest in. I'm not sure of any large one that doesn't. The incentives are aligned such that it's hard for them not to. It's easy to find examples of similar (sometimes almost identical) behavior from most large companies.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    Okay, what other company does it? You may say Apple & App Store but that's not the same.
    - tymekpavel 3y ago
      Apple/iMessage/Safari Google/Android/Chrome/YouTube Meta/Messenger/Facebook/WhatsApp ...just to name a few.
      - jrockway 3y ago
        I don't know if Safari is that important to Apple. I have the enhanced data security feature of iCloud turned on, and I can still access my stuff in Chrome on the iCloud web interface (via the auth flow on my phone). It's actually exceedingly well-thought out and a nice bone to throw to Windows users that otherwise use Apple stuff! They could have been Safari-only or Mac-only, but aren't, even for super niche features.
      - makingstuffs 3y ago
        You don’t need to use any of Facebook’s other platforms to use WhatsApp. I’ve not had a Facebook account for nigh on a decade but use WhatsApp as my main messaging app.
    - kbenson 3y ago
      Apple with iMessage onthe iPhone is about as similar as you can get, and was actually at the forefront of my mind when I wrong my comment. It's a chat platform that you have to use their product to be able to utilize.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Name one company of any size that isn’t doing the same thing?
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Valve's a great example. They have overwhelming market share and could have long since tried to tighten the screws to make a buck, and haven't done anything of the sort. They've also launched numerous 1st party systems and hardware that they could have tried to shove on people (Steamdeck, Index, controllers, etc) but, again, have done nothing of the sort.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Valve is worth around 7.7 billion and from the best I can find, it doesn’t have a quarter of the gaming market. How much power could they yield
      - somenameforme 3y ago
        That figure is quite ridiculous. Even if one completely ignores Steam and all of their games/products, even CS:GO alone is worth billions by itself, with millions of concurrent players (and growing) more than a decade after its launch! All that said, I would expect Valve's total immediate-term 'worth' to be much less than it could be, which is the entire point of this topic. The reason companies treat their customers poorly is because it's profitable, but it also has consequences. You see large short to mid term growth in exchange for long term failure. That's why I think it's more typical to see public companies treat their customers poorly than it is for private companies. Generally the "employees" (including board and CEO) of a public company are evaluated on their short to mid-term performance. By contrast private companies, especially ones that remain private long beyond the point of being able to 'cash out' with a public offering, tend to be more focused on the long term viability. So it's expected that their 'value', whatever it may be, would be less than it would be if they acted in a hostile fashion to their users.
        3y ago
osigurdson 3y ago
What organizations are interested are interested in “what is good for you or society”? Even if they start out that way, eventually corruption sets in. I’d rather have companies have a clear profit motive instead of a series of fake motives and increased regulatory capture.

scarface_74 3y ago

Open AI doesn’t have any meaningful “products” they have good technology and they charge $20 a month for a subscription to a technology demo that doesn’t come close to covering their costs. You think the employees at “Open” AI care about anything more than their large paychecks no matter what they say?

a_bonobo 3y ago
It is implied in OP's reply too, right? No word about 'hey we're giving powerful tech to a hyper-monopolist', it's only about your friends and the money
lumost 3y ago
I’d be curious if $20/mo is or is not enough to cover their costs. It’s opaque what their inference setup is, or what the final economics of LLMs will be. With 30-100 Billion param models becoming available which are in spitting distance of gpt-4, and dedicated ASIC implementations… openAI might be charging too much.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Are you taking into account they are also paying far below market costs for compute or even what a large customer could negotiate?
  - Grimblewald 3y ago
    So because their costs are lower than that of competitors, customers should pay more? Ok.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      There costs are lower…for now. Do you think Microsoft is going to subsidize them forever?
      - lumost 3y ago

jrockway 3y ago

I don't think any of that really affects the day-to-day at OpenAI if they got bought. There are plenty of counter-examples for forcing you to use Edge or ads in the Start menu. They made Typescript. They made VS Code. Those teams are just doing their thing, and it's very likely that OpenAI would be like that. Microsoft is past the world of "everyone must use our browser and OS", they really just want to sell any of their products if you'll buy them. Like, I use Outlook on my iPhone because my organization uses Office 365. That would have been unheard of a couple decades ago; Outlook and Windows was their moneymaker and if you wanted one you got both. But now, it's just teams doing their own thing. The likely effect on day-to-day for OpenAI would have been a different promotion process, their stock being worth $0, and having to use a different videoconferencing solution. I worked at a startup that got bought by a huge company, and that's basically all that changed for us. Our team continues to work on our product, and I'm only vaguely aware of what the rest of the company even does. (I think they make servers? Like solder together chips and put them in the box.) Day-to-day doesn't change much; it's the same people, the same code, and the same goals. I didn't get bought by Microsoft, but I can't imagine that these strategic acquisitions are much different across the Fortune 500.

wkat4242 3y ago
> Microsoft is past the world of "everyone must use our browser and OS" OS maybe but browser? They're going to great lengths to push Edge. Including harassing customers trying to download Chrome or Firefox.
- bdavbdav 3y ago
  Yeah I don’t think that’s true at all. It’s a minor nightmare as well in an enterprise setting trying to lock down their attempts to change defaults, push copilot, lock down office smart services etc.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yes it's a game of whack-a-mole. Even though they are in fact considering the enterprise market as a key customer. I used to manage Apple devices (iPhone but also Mac which was much more work) for a long time and that was much harder. For example, for a federated Apple ID you can still, after 5 years since release, not use federated Apple IDs if your Azure AD UPN and E-mail are not the same. In like 90% of enterprises this is not the case but they just won't fix this. Apple thinks we should just change our entire org for them. Well with Macs taking up 0,5% of our installed base that's just not going to happen (and this way it's not going to be much higher either). Not to mention all the terrible Mac ports of windows software like VPN, Security etc that don't follow Mac concepts or installers. You have to pile workaround upon workaround.

anuraaga 3y ago

I suspect many developers, including OpenAI engineers are using VSCode, maybe TypeScript for frontend engineers, GitHub for sure which had no real features like pull request approvers before Microsoft money came in. Less at OpenAI most likely, but C# and .NET are going strong with bleeding edge tech like .NET chisel containers support. And I've seen great support from their engineers working on OSS, best of FAANG. Google created the meme that a company could be evil or not but we're past that age. Let's focus on the experiences, and while not forgetting the past (yes the 90s do not paint MS well), be forgiving. MS seems to continue to develop and even innovate on a lot of this tech, painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous. Yes as with any large company, there will be parts that are good and parts that are not. Disclaimer: I have never worked at Microsoft and own no stock directly though so have ETFs. And through OSS I have some friends there that I strongly respect and think are awesome and always think of them any time I see hate talk towards MS, which is unfortunately common...

devjab 3y ago
Most of OpenAIs tech stack is AI toolage, but basically everything you interact with is written in Python. Nobody uses C# for anything serious, because why would you? It’s not a bad language, it’s just not a very good language either. Need efficiency? Rust/C++. Need an all round language? Node or Python, which are less efficient, but still powerful enough to power Instagram and well OpenAI as far as Python goes and LEGO as far as Typescript goes. Realistically you’re looking to choose between C#, Java and Go. Both Java and Go are miles ahead of C# in terms of concurrency, I mean, C# is still stuck with “await” after all, and while I guess you can have a lengthy debate on C# vs Java, 9 gazillion large companies use Java while 0 use C#. It’s not that C# is bad, like I said. It’s never really been better than it is now, it’s more a question of why would you ever use it? Even the C# developers at Microsoft admit to prototyping using Python because it’s just so much faster to build things with it, and while they do move things to C#, you have to wonder if they would if they weren’t working for Microsoft.
ParetoOptimal 3y ago
> painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous. Hard to understand this point of view with: - vscode being "open source", conveniently leaving out flagship features like live share and Python extension - Increase of "in your face, fuck you" dark patterns like forcing an account for Windows setup, forcing ms authenticator, etc