I love VSCode, I use Google Workspace for my domain, run a Mac and an iPhone (and use iCloud), a Surface Go 2 with Linux (quite workable), I host on all sorts of stuff.
Uncritically associating "trust" with a brand is a mistake. Microsoft are no more on the side of the angels than anyone else (and are very clearly on the other side in some of the legal positions they stake out, such as their amicus brief in support of Oracle against Google in the Java case).
Pick a sports team if you must, but don't pick a brand and support them loyally. Be an interchangeable consumer, because this is how they model your behaviour anyway. Maximise that.
I can’t force myself to like vscode. I need to code right? So I need 1-to be able to write text, 2-syntax highlighting. VSCode is an absolute mess of unnecessary plugins and popup that reminds me of an internet explorer 6 with too many web bars and a bonzi buddy dancing at the bottom of the screen.
I also dislike Chrome and any chrome based reskin. I appreciate Firefox and even Safari. Specially Safari for the same reasons the average JavaScript Stan hates it: it’s keeping the web from implementing the latest usb-over-browser crap or wathever the-chrome-consortion (google) comes up with. Safari on iOS is the only thing that keeps “best viewed on Chrome” from happening in current year.
You can turn off a load of stuff. You don't have to install any plugins.
VS Code has one as far as I am aware uniquely-implemented feature -- remote editing -- which is absolutely invaluable to me as a freelancer with many long-term, infrequently-updated projects.
Lots of separate VM dev environments with different editor configuration and tool requirements, and more or less only SSH config and keys to connect me to them, from whichever machine I need to.
It's the only Microsoft thing I use at the moment. I don't even have a github account.
> VS Code has one as far as I am aware uniquely-implemented feature -- remote editing -- which is absolutely invaluable to me as a freelancer with many long-term, infrequently-updated projects.
To be that one guy, Emacs has had remote editing (without even needing to install anything on the remote server, unlike vscode) for forever with tramp mode. But other, more accessible/modern editors having it is definitely nice because it's such a handy feature
Everyone always brings up Emacs with regards to VS Code's remoting features, but I have yet to see anything that supports that it is anywhere close to VS Code.
With VS Code, I can develop across Windows, Docker, Linux, Linux running on WSL, and macOS with zero configuration aside from setting up SSH connection configs and installing the remote extensions with a button click. All the extensions work seemlessly when remoting. My settings also automatically sync by just signing into GitHub.
With Devcontainers, I don't need anything to develop except Docker and VS Code. I simply pull down a repository, open it in VS Code, and then VS Code sets up a container with all dependencies and configuration.
No, Emacs does not have this experience.
And I don't know the technical reasons why VS Code installs on the remote server, but I think it's important to note that you're not just editing remotely but developing remotely.
To also be that one guy, emacs has had this with the ssh method in TRAMP basically since ssh existed. (Not the devcontainer stuff, it has something similar, but it wasn't till LXC/Docker got popular that emacs could do it that way. At least on Linux) I agree, it's amazing and great that more people are finally using this methodology, but certainly not new to VSCode
Personally zero configuration is not a selling point for me for a professional tool I rely on to do maybe the majority of my work.
I think it’s reasonable to not hold hours or even days of setup and learning against a product I’d use in this fashion. Even a tiny 1% productivity benefit obtained after configuration and learning earns me about 2.5 dev days worth of benefit every year. And if I expect to use the tool for a decade that’s almost a month.
Even if emacs can handle the remote editing side I doubt the remote debugging experience comes close to what vscode can offer with very little effort.
I do all my development on remote supercomputers and the ability to remotely debug multi-process Python and C++ applications running inside containers across many servers made me love vscode.
I guess Tramp mode must be the inspiration, to some extent.
But the VSC approach allows me to customise the tool environment within the remote extension, including going as far as using different SCSS processors and language servers, but is managed through essentially exactly the same interface as the local.
(It's also inherently multi-user; changes are reflected in each machine connected to the remote, which makes it really easy to move from a work to a home machine, or a desktop to a coffee-shop laptop.)
This is what I meant by uniquely-implemented. I often find that the most visceral critics of VSC or adherents of "natively implemented" code editors haven't the slightest awareness of this feature.
Still -- thank you for your comment, it gives me one more thing to investigate for those times when tools fail me.
Yeah, I certainly didn't mean it as a slight against VSC. (I am very much an electron hater but VSC is an exception because they obviously put in the effort to make it work as well as it does.)
Much as I love Emacs I do mostly use VSC these days, and I do tend to forget the extent of what remote editing capabilities it provides since I haven't had much reason to use them in a while.
Yes -- sorry, my comment about critics may have come across as aimed at you, but it wasn't!
I was thinking more of all the other times this has come up in the past and I have to say, "you understand it's not just a text editor with network access?"
It has pretty much unique capabilities, and as another commenter has said, it's even remarkably agnostic as to the _kind_ of remote container. For example you can run the editor on Windows with the remote as WSL, and it really blurs the boundaries between them in a way that cannot possibly be a coincidence for Microsoft.
Jetbrains Gateway offers remote editing as well. It's still Beta and certainly has some rough edges, but it works ok-ish as a daily driver and is actively developed. The last update few weeks ago even added Dev Containers support (to an extend).
I didn't want to move away from Sublime Text, so I made a continuous sync tool for remote editing. I've been using it for quite a while now and it works pretty well. https://unisync.sh/
Are you talking about Live Share? JetBrains also has collaborative sharing, inspired by Live Share.
Even though I primarily use WebStorm, when I’m working with people on a contract gig, I frequently use Live Share as a pairing tool whether to help debug something or just for training/mentoring.
No. Though it’s the basis for the live sharing mechanism as well.
I’m talking about the remote dev environments. Editing inside VMs, inside WSL, inside Docker containers or via SSH to remote machines, where the editing environment runs seamlessly on the remote, can have extensions, can do version control, run language servers etc.
Basically a part of the editor is running remotely, and yet can be managed as if it were local (e.g. an extension can be installed locally or into the remote). So your code is operated on entirely by the remote.
> So I need 1-to be able to write text, 2-syntax highlighting.
If you just need those two things there's plenty of options - why are you forcing yourself into vscode ? VSCode is great because of the plugin ecosystem - if that's not your thing use something else - there's plenty of alternatives.
Tech people are pretty gullible. Satya has a good PR operation and many people fall for the “wow it’s the new Microsoft”.
I negotiate with them. They are way more difficult and hard nosed to deal with than in the Ballmer era. The salespeople work under a sword and while they aren’t Oracle, they are in that path.
Trust doesn’t mean much with companies of this scale. You need to understand your contracts and the KPIs that drive decisions at the deal desk.
If you are an individual, why are they giving you this bounty? With Google, their motivations are very clear, and they quickly course correct (ie kill the product) when their objectives aren’t met.
When people have said they don’t trust Google, that’s precisely the reason they give. Conversely I trust Microsoft and Apple more because their motivations are also clear, and less in conflict with my interests.
I’ve no doubt that Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all equally horrible when it comes to negotiations behind-the-scenes. I’m sure they abuse KPIs as much as each other. As a customer none of that matters to me.
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.
"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!)
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.
Blindly pick one to trust sure that’s a poor choice.
But we make choices based on our experience and what information we have. I won’t trust anyone forever blindly, but I will pick some for now over others who I find untrustworthy.
Right -- I mean if I was compelled by some weird fascist law to pick one brand to trust, I'd probably pick Apple. The fascists with the nicest things, for one thing, but they have also made commitments to privacy against which they can be measured.
But I find it uncomfortable how much brain time we allow for making value judgements about brands -- it's a purely one-way emotional judgement, because as a general rule, not a single one of the people who run them would so much as piss on you if you were on fire in return.
[ Edit: This is not particularly to be taken as an argument for open source; I don't think people in the open source space are inherently more trustworthy; they have just built mechanisms where I don't have to trust them individually or severally.
We have to stop supporting "teams" in the tech world -- even at the level of employee loyalty. It's damaging, and not just to open source, but to human progress more generally. ]
IMO the fact that the open source folks built those mechanisms indicates they they are inherently more trustworthy. I mean, in many cases the honest party is also the one happy to do things in the open.
> I mean, in many cases the honest party is also the one happy to do things in the open.
This may be true, but there are longstanding figures in open source who I would not trust as far as I could spit.
It's a mistake to see the openness of open source or open access as a guide to trusting the people who produced it. Dual_EC_DRBG is a good example of why.
I just find it crazy. When I started my career and Balmer was ceo of ms, ms was the big bad. Don't trust anything ms releases because they'll use it to screw you over. Doc format? Evil. Xml format? Evil. Etc. Google, Google has your back.
Today ms is the underdog in the digital world. Google is looking to take away every last bit of your privacy and use it against you. And they will kill anything they release in a year or two.
Everyone has been that demon at one point or other (even Apple -- the "look and feel" lawsuits that are a bit before your time).
I was thinking the other day about how sure I was that MySQL was toast as soon as Oracle acquired Berkeley DB and InnoDB, and then how sure I was it would be hobbled when they acquired Sun and got the whole shebang.
What happened, actually, is that MySQL got better and better, with only a few annoying Oracley missteps along the way (permissions structure changes in a minor release for example).
But what matters in that story is that Oracle vs (big bad) Google was substantially decided for Google, despite what Oracle (and Microsoft) wanted. Because it limits Oracle's power to use the MySQL APIs against competitors in the same way as it limits their ability to use them against Java competitors.
This is what I mean: these are big competing interests. We are small interchangeable customers and consumers. It's worth avoiding investing belief in any of them.
This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and GitHub was abused to train a LLM. Microsoft and Google have both shown they would sell your data in a heartbeat to make a quick buck.
Turn off telemetry, delete ChatGPT conversations, and I like having an LLM for GitHub
versus
Give us all your personal data and we're sharing it with ad partners, your personal data is our number one product and secondary products are only made to support the first endeavor.
MS has lot more products were you can't completely turn off telemetry if you aren't using the Enterprise version.
Don't forget the Office 365 "productivity" measures.
And the latest insanity, at least for me, ads in the settings of Windows 11. Never ever put ads in any configuration menu of the operating system. That clearly says, it's not my computer, its MS's and they try to squeeze every penny out they can get. So they aren't any different from Google, they even try to push you to the Cloud and then make mistakes a cloud enterprise shouldn't make
Back in the dot com boom era they would give you a whole computer for free just so you would look at their ads. Now you pay for the computer and the OS and you get to look at the ads.
The Free PC people must be wondering what they did wrong.
>ads in the settings of Windows 11. Never ever put ads in any configuration menu of the operating system.
Why not? I think they're great: they make more money for M$. If the users don't like it, too bad. Why should I care about them?
>That clearly says, it's not my computer, its MS's and they try to squeeze every penny out they can get.
That's right. It's not your computer, and you should just accept that and get used to it. You chose this path, by choosing MS as your OS provider.
>So they aren't any different from Google
No, they are different: Google doesn't control my PC's OS. The only PC OS they control is ChromeOS, which only runs on certain (usually low-end) hardware, and isn't normally used for any serious work.
That LLM was trained on FOSS software that others like myself wrote and did not consent to have used in such a manner. Even if you're also a FOSS contributor and you're fine with it, I'm not.
So you like it, but you're not the party whose consent matters. You're the customer consuming the laundered goods from the fence.
If you release source code under a FOSS license doesn’t that specifically mean that you explicitly consent to it being used in ways you might not be fine with?
No, the licence is the thing that defines what they'd be fine with. I don't think it's possible to write a licence that allows you to do things with the software that the licence forbids.
I think that’s mostly my point. GP release source code, presumably under a license that permitted this use. It’s okay to not be happy that it was used this way… but that’s life
It is a new angle of attack that the authors of the code didn’t know was coming.
I think it is pretty obvious that lots of GPL authors wouldn’t want their code to be productized in ways that don’t contribute back to the community, because they had the ability to use a BSD or MIT license and didn’t take it.
If you don't want people to learn from your code then don't open source it. Learning via LLM vs person learning is a distinction that sounds unenforceable in practice.
The stealing open source code is generally extremely difficult to prevent in practice; nobody knows by default if you copy-paste some open source code into a closed code base. But this shouldn’t prevent us from calling out bad behavior when we do see it.
Legally, of course, LLMs are not people. They don’t have the same rights as people, and it isn’t obvious whether or not they can legally generate new IP. They operate by a complicated but essentially mechanical process, and it is pretty novel to say that such a process could be used to remove copyrights.
But the defendant won't be Microsoft — they just provided a tool, and that's legal. No, the defendant will be the downstream consumer who incorporated the code spat out by the LLM.
It doesn't matter whether the LLM "learned" — intent is irrelevant and the defendant will have committed copyright violation regardless. The LLM can't copyright-wash the code — nobody can.
Yes, this is exactly true among the popular FOSS licenses.
The attribution licenses such as ALv2, BSD, MIT, etc. which are generally considered to be "permissive" still require attribution, and this condition is not upheld by popular LLMs.
Of course, the copied material has to be judged substantial enough for the license to apply in a court of law, which is a human-arbitrated threshold.
It will most likely be a copyleft author who eventually brings a court case, but the attribution licenses do not allow for LLM usage either unless the LLM provides attribution and preserves notices as spelled out in the licenses.
OSS people complaining about licenses while simultaneously ignoring the license they granted Github is peak irony. I'm totally fine with it, it's why I do it, I don't need accolades and I'm not straddling a user with legal agreements, that's not freedom in my mind.
GitHub only has the FOSS license because the TOS applies only to the owner of the repo, but contributors to the code in the repo are not required to agree to the TOS. None of the popular FOSS licenses except CC0 grant rights which allow LLM training — they all require attribution at least and the copyleft licenses require reciprocity (when the copied code is substantial enough for the license to apply).
Wrong, you cannot commit to github without first agreeing to the TOS. Every user does it. Y'all are gonna get beat up in court and I think it's going to be hilarious.
> Wrong, you cannot commit to github without first agreeing to the TOS. Every user does it.
The point is that there are repositories on Github that contain commits from non-Github-users. For example, not every single commit to the Linux kernel has been made by a Github user, but there is a mirror at https://github.com/torvalds/linux .
And when Linus who owns the entirety of the Linux copyright created the mirror, he agreed to the TOS. You're playing a dumb game and what I find odd about license zealots is their inability to respect licences that they're not forcing on others. Have any more prime examples you need debunked?
Linus Torvalds doesn’t own all the copyright on Linux — Linux doesn’t require copyright assignment from contributors.
> You're playing a dumb game
For what it’s worth I’m not a lawyer and surely get some things wrong but licensing is an area where I have a certain amount of practical experience.
There’s some interesting ground to cover on this topic but we aren’t getting there and the incivility isn’t helping. Please consider this passage from the HN guidelines:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries."
Also, take it up with Torvalds:
"And yes, at least under US copyright law, and at least if you see Linux as a "collective work" (which is arguably the most straightforward reading og copyright law, but perhaps not the only one) I am actually the sole owner of copyright in the *collective* work of the Linux kernel."
If you believe Linus, and I do, you can see how your argument is devoid of logic when Linus himself owns the collective work and put it on GitHub.
You can turn off telemetry on Windows, you can try blocking Google from a network or DNS perspective, but in most cases that renders the site in an unusable state.
This is trivial for Microsoft to bypass. They've already been consolidating and moving server addresses. Unless you block all internet traffic, you have no idea what's getting through. They can update the opaque code at any time. This is not a solution.
None, because the data asymmetry is how Google earns revenue. If they just sold the data, you'd set up a competing ad network that undercuts AdSense by operating on slightly outdated snapshots.
This is why they charge third parties to run unauditable google-provided code on top of your data instead.
Also, they sell provide it governments in the form of warrant requests.
For more info, read up in google ad auction fraud, and google location warrant.
Microsoft is actually worse though. For one thing, Windows’ default telemetry level lets them pull files off your machine. Here’s a Microsoft apologist explaining it:
The US CLOUD Act (which Microsoft lobbied for) means that they have to pull that data in response to US warrant requests, regardless of what country you are in.
Also, they already merged mojang (minecraft) into the Microsoft login umbrella. It is clearly a dry run for when they merge linkedin and github in, so they can provide better worker surveillance capabilities to their corporate customers.
Corporate has data about people. For example, if you plan a holiday, Google, Meta, and others know it. If your wife suffers from a serious condition, Google, Meta, and others know it. Corporate has extensive databases and every person is potentially profiled with a lot of detail.
Advertisers don't usually receive detailed information, instead they are promised that their advertisements are targeted correctly. To do that the data about people is used.
But with this data Corporate gets too much power. Corporate needs to follow Human Rights, like states. One aspect is that there is no due process in case of conflicts, like someone being wrongly excluded from using a Corporate service. We also need transparency about how this data is used exactly and who else gets views.
Europe is trying to establish transparency with the GDPR, however is foiled by malicious compliance by Corporate. It does not help that Europe is clumsy.
Github wasn't abused to train LLMs. Whatever website existed that openly hosted OSS repositories would have been scrapped if it had such a large number of repos. You don't need to be Microsoft to train on github.
The question is: How much private repos went into copilot? I guess for specific software (how to use a commercial database? How to use some enterprise framework?) they'd find more relevant samples there, which might be worthwhile scanning.
GitHub has always said that they only train on public repos. I don’t see why they’d lie about that - including private repos would only add a relatively small amount of data to the corpus and would risk alienating all their corporate customers.
> GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories
When copilot was originally released, I was able to get it to generate verbatim my extremely niche and poorly written code from a completely private repo. It was identifiable by the bad variable names that I used. I cant say they traines it on all pricate repos, but they definitely trained it on my private repos.
Did you reach out to any tech press figures or publicize this in any way? It would have been a fairly important story and should have been pretty easy for somebody else to reproduce by generating the same completions and comparing them to your commit history.
I don’t mean to be dismissive but unless you did something like that or documented it in some way it’s hard to give too much weight to a “source: trust me” comment from a brand-new HN account.
That is a shockingly bad website for mobile. Whole screen is taken up by an uncloseable menu, jeez you would think stack overflow could get responsive design right.
Meanwhile the development world has more or less shrugged its shoulders. The mass exodus of Github never happened, and aside from the dogmatic, VS Code seems to have a firm grasp on mindshare.
As a daily vscode user, I can report that it doesn’t have my mindshare, I’ve just adopted a realism wrt Microsoft’s state sanctioned monopoly and need to get work done. It’s convenient only because msft can make it inconvenient not to use it. My feeling is more Stockholm Syndrome than one of msft earning my “mindshare.”
It’s worth noting that Microsoft offers enterprise/business variants of most solutions that are (more) private by design. This includes GitHub Copilot, Azure OpenAI GPT services, Bing Chat, M365 Copilot, etc.
It’s really a consumer’s decision when it comes to Microsoft. Either you use the basic/free version in exchange for your privacy, or you pay for a business account.
I’m not sure Google really offers that as equitably across their offerings. They seem more focused on driving their ad/data collection business rather than private, enterprise solutions (just my two cents).
It's valuable to Microsoft, but why would anybody else want to pay for data about the usage of a Microsoft product?
And why would Microsoft sell it? Like would you want to sell information like "X% of users can't figure out how to change the code formatting settings"? Or if you did learn something cool and useful, why would you sell it to the potential competition?
A lot of tech companies would pay for that vast trove of user data. There are possibly no better sources on usage for mass consumer software than what Microsoft has from the past few decades (Office and Windows in particular; the next best would be browsers and or various Apple software).
Why would anybody pay for customer traffic/browsing/shopping data for inside of a Walmart store? Nearly every retailer would pay for access to that, assuming the cost is reasonable. Vendors desperately want access to it.
Microsoft would be crazy to sell it openly. Its part of their competitive advantage, helping to protect $83 billion in operating income. They'd get tiny particles of revenue in comparison to the gigantic golden egg they're sitting on.
Data isn't intrinsically valuable, useful data is.
I can't imagine a lot of cases where telemetry would be on sale.
On one hand, telemetry is specific to a specific product. Knowing how often people use the File menu in Visual Studio doesn't help me with my own application that much.
On the other hand, telemetry is potentially a boon to the competition. Can you imagine if say, the LibreOffice project could buy MS Office telemetry to better decide what features to implement, or just to embarrass Microsoft by revealing how much something crashes?
For me, pretty much all telemetry seems to fall into one of those two boxes -- either useless because I'm not working on a clone, or useful and MS would be nuts to sell the info to me because I am working on a clone.
> Why would anybody pay for customer traffic/browsing/shopping data for inside of a Walmart store? Nearly every retailer would pay for access to that, assuming the cost is reasonable. Vendors desperately want access to it.
But Walmart would be crazy to sell it as-is, because why would they help their competition optimize their store layouts/warehousing? At best, I think Walmart might want to sell a derived service, like a slow trickle of recommendations to improve sales. Not the actual underlying data.
You know those preinstalled-but-not-really app ads that are in the Start Menu, for Candy Crush and the like? How much do you think those are worth — what's the right CPM for them? (And yes, these are adspace, with CPM costs — even if you never click+install Candy Crush from the start menu, you're still being reminded of its existence every time you open the start menu, so the impressions are valuable, not just the conversions.)
Microsoft knows the right CPM for these, because of their telemetry about start-menu usage. And while Microsoft isn't selling that information, per se, they are giving it to partners who consider running one of those ads.
Okay but that’s indirect effects. Telemetry isn’t what’s valuable in your example — the ad is.
Everything you do as a company, that creates value, also indirectly helps your ad prices if you start selling ads. That is the Google strategy: they used to deliver immense value with little monetization and now the balance has changed.
Having an issue with this with that reasoning is akin to having an issue with a company creating anything of value.
I don’t even know how to find common ground with such a take. You’re saying vscode telemetry (which can be turned off by the way) is as bad as other data monetization because building a better product is profitable?
Any evidence to support this? Or did you mean everything you send which would be completely expected and normal per their terms? I see no IP traffic when typing but not sending data to ChatGPT.
I think you could only do this by caching the characters and mixing them in with later queries, but that behavior should be visible in the client side code.
It's a product of sports-teams consumerism. People make affiliation with a sports team or corporate brand into part of their identity. When they fall out with one brand they feel compelled to fill the resulting void in their soul with another affiliation. That's why Google behaving badly prompts them to reconsider the merits of a completely different corporation.
I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you'll ever see on any mainstream platform. One particular strength is that creators don't seem too bound to producing videos for specific length of time. There are literally informative mini-documentaries 90 seconds long while others might go on for 4 hours and they cover every imaginable topic. This is definitely the last subscription I'd give up if I had to.
The hate for youtube is understandable when you consider how much of it Google changes without listening to anyone. They know they have an effectively monopoly position on video hosting and thus just do whatever they want.
They'll let their system ban whoever it wants, only letting a human review things if the person is sufficiently large/well-connected. They change their policies on a whim regardless of impact on people making a living off Youtube, same with demonetization, they also continue to allow content-ID and DMCA to be abused and have made search completely useless.
People are still using YouTube not because they like it, but simply because of the existing network effect and wanting to support their preferred creators. Thus it makes total sense why people would be willing to pay creators but not Google.
I think the constant obnoxious YT Premium ads are a big reason for the animosity. That and that it doesn't feel like an option. They really increased the amount of ads so it fells like an extortion - pay or suffer.
Most YT ads are abhorrent and incredibly repetitive. Awful music and a piercing voice. I very quickly develop loathing for the brand I see on YT ads.
The worst adverts on youtube are those long pseudo-documentary ads about the unusual backstory of some radical new inexpensive device that is going to change some industry and doctors/oil companies would prefer you didn't know about. The ones with the AI voices.
> I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads.
Much of the “fantastic” content I do watch on YouTube has sponsored content in the video. Mostly I avoid YouTube.
correct, but also for me, much of the usefulness of youtube is for looking up how to do something quick. This has been ruined by google emphasizing longer vids to up the “engagement” aka add time… and so now all of youtube has become the video equivalent of a recipe site…
I also love Youtube (I've learned a staggering amount from it), but maybe qualify your "anyone" here ;-)
> nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads
Assuming you mean the no-ads-plus-music offer, in the UK that is £12.99 a month. So the yearly cost is worth more than a whole month of food for me, and I don't eat badly (I just shop well).
A month's worth of food for a single adult is objectively not a very small amount of money, spread over a year.
> pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads
because it doesn't do away with _all_ the ads: every video still has the video maker themselves talking about their 'sponsor' for at least a minute, reminding us to 'like and subscribe' for at least ten seconds, and a patreon scroll of users that have paid extra for another three minutes
Youtube ads can potentially found in all videos and you don't really have a choice because there's no practical alternative to Youtube. So you either pay or use an adblocker (while it works). There's value in Youtube and I can easily see why would someone pay for the ad-free subscription.
Then again creators who choose to advertise or promote commercial products in their videos have a fraction of the leverage that Youtube has. If you don't like them, simply don't watch those channels and find something else. By choosing to promote products they'll implicitly choose to filter out some segments of their potential audience, and that's their choice. Youtube has nothing to do with that, they would place promotions in their videos no matter what service they use as their video outlet.
It costs money to run YouTube and it costs creators money to make content. Some of them are trying to make a living doing it. If you don't want to pay and you don't want to see ads, how do you expect the service to function?
Literally 3-6 taps (to fast forward 20-50 seconds) on a phone. Two-Three clicks using the web. Grabbing the remote, pressing 3 times "right" and "ok" for a TV running YouTube.
Creators can't live from YouTube alone (yt premium makes this better afaik, but you still get paid per watch time, which can go against your content or ethics), so they do sponsored ads integrated into their videos. For some the yt-alone revenue is only 20-40% of the total.
YouTube censorship works really well whenever it hears swear words or god forbid you show a bit too much of human body, but apparently 10 to 60 seconds of ad crap is undetectable to them.
Demonetize the shit out of the video, on subsequent offense demonetize whole channel.
Whenever I use someone else’s account or am not logged in I’m shocked by how ad filled YouTube is. Easily my most automatic subscription and worth every penny.
The creators typically have one 30 second spot where they often do a humorous riff. Not that big a deal.
You went from talking about ads to calling this site obnoxious? First of all, if you found my comment obnoxious, it's not "this site" that's obnoxious, it's this user!
My comment was mild. I find the increase in ads on youtube to be obnoxious. You find value in Premium, because you don't suffer ads. It's a fair call to wonder whether the value you find comes from "not seeing obnoxious levels of ads" vs anything else, such as the quality of service offered under premium.
End of the day: my criticism is directed at Google, for encouraging clickbait spammer content; increasing intrusive ads and charging too much in order to not suffer those increasing ads.
I'd like to take this paid option, but for some reason the official YouTube app on my Google Pixel is broken - the screen overlay never goes away, I can't see comments on videos, and trying to go to a channel takes me to "An error occurred RETRY" screen.
Unfortunately, I don't think Google does any kind of support for their YouTube app on their phones. Casual googling brought me to some forum posts that didn't seem helpful, and I've heard too many horror stories about Google support to put much effort into this route.
Quite unfortunate. Other options (NewPipe, Firefox Android + uBlock Origin) have their own problems. I might try to turn channels into podcasts and listen to them from my podcast player. Maybe that'll work.
If your phone is otherwise normal, clearing the app's cache and data is usually a good way to get things working again for cases like "this app obviously must not be doing this on other people's phones"
Youtube, when compared to any other streaming / video on demand / film tv services etc, has by far the most insane value proposition.
The sheer amount of content on there for the price is well worth paying. I use adblocks everywhere, I use pihole, I am really strong on that. But I do use Youtube a lot, and it is only fair that I pay the price. It is very reasonably priced.
Google bought YouTube, kept it low ads, and ran everyone else on the internet out of business. People would watch hunt you if you said they would ever add a lot of ads, but then they saturated it with ads. That is a globally-scale, economy transforming bait and switch move to gain a near monopoly on online videos. So: some people are mad
>I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube
It's still a Google product that does Google things. If you hate Google things, making an exception for YouTube is saying your standards have a price tag attached.
What nuance would you want? YouTube is the most similar to Google Search of all Google products in regards to 'doing things people hate about Google', beyond maybe Android. The product has been trend-chasing for years trying to do what Twitch, Instagram and Tiktok did all to sell more ads and data to in turn become more profitable, because we all know a few clear tech guides without ads are not turning YouTube anywhere as profitable as another 30 second short or 10-minute pog-face clickbait for kids who somehow have access to their parents' credit card or primed to become the perfect future consumers.
It's been a very, very long time since YouTube has been very profitable for individuals who aren't playing Google's game or started before that time. Practically any new channel is clout-chasing, appealing to kids or unsatisfied adults in some form, with few able to replicate a momentary success if not following these tactics. Enshittification of the platform has been going on for at least a decade now and Google isn't showing any signs of stopping. A few people making themselves believe "oh well it isn't so bad because tech guides" may as well say "Google Search isn't so bad because I can specify the website and aggressively avoid ads".
But YouTube is the good guy because it.. centralizes content creators and soft-locks them into Google's desired format, be it now or in the future? What, do people think if WEI succeeds, YouTube won't be a future candidate for whatever funny business Google decides on next?
That is more detail of the same earlier position, which is that someone who "generally avoid[s]" Google products actually "hate[s] Google things," and that anyone who "generally avoid[s]" Google products is a sell-out ("your standards have a price tag attached") for not avoiding a specific Google product. All OP said was that not all Google products are undesirable, and your reply completely mischaracterized what he or she said -- turning general avoidance into hatred -- and then attacked its own strawman for hypocrisy. That's polarization: if you're not on Team A, then you must be on Team B, and never the twain shall meet. Giving more examples people like you hate about a company doesn't really advance the discussion.
OP doesn't like many products from a particular company, but does appreciate one of them. There isn't a lot to argue with there.
This is exactly how I use YouTube. My biggest issue is the sponsored ads that get in the way of me paying not to have ads. I hope they find a solution for this.
Interesting, I still don't, though I acknowledge perhaps Google has the greater capacity for harm; here's why.
Over time, Google absolutely has been in a position to abuse data, and to some extent it has done so -- but honestly, if you compare what they COULD do to what they END UP DOING, they're not doing so bad at all. They mostly self-correct relatively nicely.
Microsoft, on the other hand, clearly does the bare minimum. They've had to be dragged kicking and screaming into actually providing a modicum of safety after more-or-less setting the stage for garbage tech security practices.
From my personal and limited view I agree. But to be honest, I don't trust neither, at all, probably forever. MS actively destroyed 1 decent thing I liked about them, their OS.
First they tried to make it better and actually succeeded over the years (anybody who went from Windows 95/98 into 2000/XP and realized MS can actually make stable usable modern OS would probably agree, 7 was their best OS for me). And then they went with telemetry on product that really shouldn't have any, in same vein BIOS or drivers shouldn't have any. And despite overall feedback they doubled down with it in 11. No sympathy nor morality there.
All of these companies are obviously totally untrustworthy and anyone trying to convince you otherwise is either incredibly naive, stupid or has an ulterior motive.
They all have ideas and incentives and motives, and the world hasn't yet collapsed. Yes, watch them carefully, but, e.g. I don't think the world is improved if we just annihilate Google and Microsoft.
NSLs and FISAs are insidious and powerful tools that the US Federal government utilizes against the populace.
Once the government sets about forcing requirements, those two tools ensure that the companies, organizations, or individuals, cannot speak to the requirements or that there was a discussion at all.
Never attribute to malice which can be easily attributed to stupidity. Secret courts, and secret squirrel government activities against its own populace are definitely stupid.
What could do with your data to make more money that they aren’t?
Sure in theory they could be selling access to anyone’s Gmail account to the highest bidder, but that’s going to lose them money by actively driving their customers away.
Google may be actively harmful/evil, but they aren’t stupid.
Indexing and fingerprinting your browser history locally in Chrome, to generate a set of demographic and special-interest identifier tags, that are then attached to your Google account; where the special-interests are used by Google Ads to personalize the ad auctions, and the demos are used by Google Ads to price your CPMs.
Most people don't want to see ads... But if they do see ads, they don't really care how it is decided which ones to show... Phase of the moon, random numbers, or the third word of every email in my gmail account are all equally fine in my eyes.
However, I do care about what other uses my data might be used for.
Therefore, googles solution of using all my private data, but with the opensource code running on my machine within my control, is actually perfect for both me and them.
>Sure in theory they could be selling access to anyone’s Gmail account to the highest bidder, but that’s going to lose them money by actively driving their customers away.
I'd say that doing so might drive some of their users (i.e., product) away, but would be a boon for their customers (i.e., advertisers).
And IIUC, they are already selling access to the information they glean from reading the contents of gmail accounts by using that data to "target" ads at gmail users. No, Google isn't literally selling the contents of email messages, but they are selling access to user information based on the content of those email messages.
Based on their behavior to this point, one can be pretty confident that Google/Alhpabet will do whatever they think will maximize revenue and profit, regardless of the impact that might have on their product (i.e., you)>
Yeah, I'm not too concerned with "make more money," but the thing we seem to have to actively beat back every few years is "give Google effective ownership and control of how the web operates" -- something that I think might not be horrible in the short term, but I believe 100% would bite us in the long term.
It doesn't matter if the companies abuse the data.
Any data they have is available to federal police without a warrant.
The federal police are absolutely capable and willing to abuse the data to violate human rights.
The out of control intelligence community in the USA are like the agents from The Matrix - they can subvert any otherwise-trustworthy participant in the system. This means none of the participants are trustworthy.
Times are changin’. All you young whippersnappers wouldn’t believe that back in my day, Microsoft was evil, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Google was the scrappy upstart who prided themselves on not serving ads and irrelevant fluff on the search results page.
If you go back enough, Microsoft was the scrappy upstart, sort of. They were this small software company loved by most, the creators of Windows and Excel and all that.
The amount of fuckery going on the background never saw the light of day back then. People seemed to be happy with them bundling more and more crap in their products, a move that killed most of their competition.
They haven’t given up on that, to the point where they still bundle up apps that only play nice to each other.
Google may be terrible, I won’t argue otherwise. But Microsoft has and will always try to control the entirety of the stack, from hardware to servers to operating systems to applications, in a way that would make any Apple exec salivate thinking about vertical integration.
> Microsoft has and will always try to control the entirety of the stack
> from hardware to servers to operating systems to applications, in a way that would make any Apple exec salivate thinking about vertical integration
Apple has the world's most valuable integrated stack. At scale nobody integrates more tightly or better than Apple, and nobody makes more money from that tight integration. It's the foundation of their entire business and has been for a long time.
That's a pretty bizarre premise to suggest Apple is lacking in the integrated approach. That's exactly what they do, very aggressively. Imagine Microsoft building their own processors and then Windows only running on those. You have the integrated salivation inverted, it's the other way around - Microsoft execs can only dream of the business gain they could have if they actually had Apple's level of ownership (over its ecosystem) but over everything Windows touches.
Microsoft doesn't even have a play in mobile OS / mobile app stores. Whereas Apple is one of the duopolists in that critical segment.
You could start your computer, then your browser, then visit a few websites, and never interact with any product not owned by Microsoft, minus perhaps routers and switches. Your traffic could even be routed through some of the undersea cables owned by them, to ad networks ran in their massive cloud.
> Imagine Microsoft building their own processors and then Windows only running on those.
I’m old enough to remember the amount of leverage Microsoft has with the entirety of the x86 platform, e.g. [0]
Microsoft does not need a proprietary hardware platform, although the hasn’t stopped them from trying to lock other OS out (see TPM).
Apple's vertical integration really ends at the cloud. There's iCloud, but that's a small offering. Microsoft has Azure, which extends their vertical integration in a direction Apple doesn't even try for.
>But Microsoft has and will always try to control the entirety of the stack, from hardware to servers to operating systems to applications, in a way that would make any Apple exec salivate thinking about vertical integration.
I always said that the perfect stack was probably a 100% Microsoft stack. Everything they build (OS, email, mice, keyboards, etc.) works great with everything else they build. The problem is that putting even one non-Microsoft item in the stack causes the whole thing to implode.
Want to use a MacBook Pro on the network? Too bad, now your printers don't work. Want to install Chrome? Now you can't use certain Sharepoint features. Plug in a Logitech webcam and now Teams hates you.
Well. They were proud of no fluff on the home page. But they had ads on SERPs, though they were text only ads with strict styling. This was good because they replaced evil Flash ads.
It's wrong to "trust" any company. Use the products that make your life easier, but understand that companies don't care about you. They care about making money.
The best part is that Microsoft and Google are working together towards the end goal of locking users out of their own machines.
Microsoft is really pushing for its trusted OS platform, with a completely locked down kernel, that will grant them full control over what can and cannot be done on the computer. Google is pushing for the same, but in the browser space. Except their Web Integrity effort has no chance of succeeding unless there's an OS support. One guess who'll be providing that.
Then, once all is in place, there will be a fully opaque content delivery pipeline from online servers to users' HDMI monitors. No peeking.
And that's just one application of the trusted OS. Once people lose control over their machines, it'll open the floodgates for lot more nefarious opportunities.
But, yeah, this new Microsoft is so white and fluffy that it's almost unbearable.
I am the last guy to play apologist to Microsoft and Google.
While the potential for abuse is there, these are the same sorts of concerns raised over UEFI secure boot, and the sky failed to fall over that. You can still run Linux if you want, it's fine.
Things will likely be OK. Maybe more annoying than before.
"can run linux if you want" - but it's difficult enough that most of us just give up and run one or the other and it's definitely not user friendly enough to ever teach a relative. I've been a casual Linux user for 25 years now. I've officially given up dualbooting. One software update by Microsoft or accidental EFI change the house of cards seems to fall apart.
idk, I've been dual booting for awhile with secure boot and haven't had any issues. It was definitely less stable like 10 years ago sure, but nowadays I think a lot of the wrinkles have been ironed out.
You can tell a lot about a company's priorities by how they make most of their money, and if you do that you see that Google is an Advertising/surveillance company disguised as a tech company, while Microsoft is a professional/enterprise services company disguised as a tech company.
Obviously this isn't perfect because both Google and Microsoft are giant diversified companies with lots of revenue streams, but I think you can roughly understand the way they will behave by looking at them through this lens.
This is why Google sinks resources into Android, but retires projects like their domain registrar: because android is an excellent advertising/surveillance platform: they can not only serve ads using Android, they can collect surveillance info on users to sell better ads.
Conversely, Microsoft invests resources where they do because they want to make the Windows/Office useful for professionals at work. They are sinking billions into OpenAI so that they can develop their Office Copilot to make their Office/Windows platform more appealing to C-Suites writing emails and memos in Outlook and Word
I don’t trust either of them as far as I can throw them, and you shouldn’t trust them either.
Businesses’ singular pursuit of short-term profits over the past four decades has kept wages down, utterly destroyed the environment, and eroded the global working-class.
It is thus now difficult to trust the same corporations to “do the right thing” or “lead us to a better tomorrow.”
Fool me once…
Finding more or less trust in the newfound altruism of the very same companies at the heart of the system that created or supported all these negative externalities suddenly espousing new and reformed values is rich.
I can’t believe anybody actually trusts them after looking at the state of the world they created. I grant the argument that you might trust one more than the other, relative to one another, but one thing the past century should have taught all of us is that we shouldn’t lend our trust to profit-seeking private companies as they aren’t incentivized to “do the right thing” generally.
I’m all for collective efforts and even companies changing the world for the better. I just don’t think the current crop will suddenly reform with Aquarian awareness and become model benevolent entities suddenly worthy of extending our personal trust.
Google search has become nearly unusable, while Microsoft’s core consumer products still seem OK - you can still install Windows 11 without a Live account through a workaround.
I can run games on Linux and do work on a Mac. Search is still a problem, but I am increasingly turning to ChatGPT for searching anything non current event, with Bing increasingly.
I was a full Google stack, Android, Home, TV, everything, for a few years. I don’t know about trust, but Google products just flat out suck with constant disappointment, and search is no exception.
Part of the issue with search, I cannot 'totally' blame on Google. (Note: I blame them some. Made $300,000,000,000 last year. Have 140,000 employees. Their main product is search + ads. There should be an army of programmers working to make the experience relevant / pleasant / not unusable).
However, there's also an army that works to fill every single slightly "wrong" search result with 100's of answers (they're not even necessarily malicious).
I tried to search for HyperPhysics [1] the other day. Yet, for the life of me could not remember the exact name. Hypertextbook, Super Physics, Super Curricula, Super Simple Physics, ect... In some ways its just name collision. Only so many words that mean "hyper, super, awesome" and 10^10 humans that want them.
Google is fine if you're searching for restaurants or a Wikipedia article. I'm sure they handle the vast majority of their mundane queries well.
It's awful, much worse than it used to be, if you're looking for some specific piece of information. Put a word or phrase in quotes, and it will still just ignore it after the first 3 or 4 results and give you a bunch of irrelevant garbage.
Not as weird as this meme. You assume it’s some signal expression rather than that I would just pay Google money every month to provide search results that don’t prioritize advertisements over more accurate results that don’t calculate a margin.
Interesting way to put it. Almost like refusing to pay the local thugs for "protection", and seeing the consequences of not paying get worse every year.
Google increased ads on youtube to the point where it's now ugly and excessive. This doesn't make premium more valuable in its own right. It makes avoiding premium more uncomfortable, which is a lot different than your implication that people refuse or can't see the value of premium.
Just because you got something for free at the start doesn't mean it will stay that way. Other platforms like Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc keep increasing prices year after year, even creating paid ad-supported tiers, and since most people pay YouTube by watching ads, ads are increasing commensurately too. Where's the confusion? The "refusal" refers to there being options where you don't have to see ads. I don't get to watch Netflix for free with ads; how is that better?
Youtube contains endless "generative fill" content made with all the care and effort of a vending machine. Lifeless, worthless, rinse/repeat content made by content spammers. A slap in the face in terms of value for money.
On Youtube's homepage recently I saw this video: "5 Tallest Building Demolitions in History". Worth a look, right? Wrong. Narrated with an artificial voice, and containing about 11 minutes of stock video clips, padding things out to reach the 12 minute length. The few seconds of demolition footage is fleeting and extremely low quality because the uploader doesn't own the footage.
Netflix isn't infected with such blatantly empty clickbait rubbish, so is a poor comparison if you're tying to say "but you pay $15 a month for Netflix, why not Youtube"?
While Youtube provides a "tip jar" called "super thanks", Google takes a 30% cut of whatever is tipped to the creator, ON TOP of what they take from advertising and premium fees. Google takes and takes. They increase ads as if there's no limit. Do you think advertising should have limits? Or are you fine with YouTube becoming wall to wall repetitive intrusive ads unless people pay the protection fee to not suffer the onslaught?
Where did YouTube enter the discussion? Also yes the things I search for would be in the minority of overall searches, but apparently finding Google unable to fulfill searches for these things despite it being able to do so 7 years ago is just memetic transference and not an actual critique.
Your comment was hard to read for me but I took it as you want a premium search that prioritizes results instead of ads. And I’m telling you that another popular product, YouTube, has premium and people don’t want to pay for it. So premium search would not change anything, except for a small minority of people like yourself.
The internet has changed drastically and become orders of magnitude bigger in the last 7 years. Your expectations may be unrealistic when there are so many parties that want to game the system.
My model for this is that the top dog tries to change the landscape to serve their own interest, which makes them the bad guy. The underdog naturally opposes those changes, which makes them seem like the good guys, even though it's actually just self-serving. A defense. The underdog may even go the extra step and market themselves as the one who's on the user's side, the champion of privacy. I fell for this with Apple a few years ago. But really, all these entities are amoral and just looking for the best available path to pursue their own goals, and any decision made by any of them exists in the possibility space for all of them. It's not really trust that you should give them, it's an acknowledgement that they are (for the moment) the lesser of several evils.
Thanks to the ongoing enshittification of big tech, it's basically pissing into an ocean of piss out there, and all these takes are all relative against a terribly odious baseline of dark patterns, customer-hostile data hovering and general cheapness.
My point is... Is the observation in TFA because Microsoft is becoming more trustworthy or because Google is becoming shittier? Anyone who has had the displeasure of installing (let alone actually using) Windows 11 should know the answer.
This is going to be one of those areas where many (but not all) HN + reddit users will need to check their bubble at the door. Both Microsoft and Google are widely trusted brands whether you slice it by consumers, developers, etc.
Its a standard. People trust it to work. That is Very different than trust in the overall ecosystem that is foisted upon them. Ask anyone how much they trust any EULA.
make this make sense? what is this literally about? what is a coherent thought here? cause all that shows is just a haphazardly thrown together table of random stuff.
microsoft has just as shitty of a track record with killing products, poor privacy and overt data collection/telemetry, and just shitty/stagnating products.
like, remember that time they had a myriad of consumer products going on around windows 7/8 era, and then seemingly killed them all? windows phone, nokia/lumia, zune, xbox/groove music, microsoft band, and now cortana. a whole bunch of stuff that made up a holistic experience, that just does not exist anymore, not even presently within just microsoft.
What's happening? Google is a company where you are not the customer, you are the product. They have also reached a mature stage where the only thing left to do is squeeze society tightly for short-term gain through psychological manipulation. I trust neither the company nor anyone working there.
I think its a bit harsh to condemn all of the people working at google. its one of the few places left that has corners of real work going on. but yeah, I worked there very briefly, and the degree of whitewashing is really stunning
One plus I will give to Microsoft is their moves in the direction to Right To Repair. Most recently they've made spare parts for an xbox joystick available to order [0], having done something similar for Surface laptops a while back. OTOH, Google pushes planned obsolescence hard the way they limit OS updates for Android devices and (to a lesser extent) Chromebooks.
You updated a bias that was originally strengthened by meme reinforcement more so than firsthand experience, after acquiring enough new facts and ideas and life experience to recontextualize it. Sounds very normal, why not ask instead why it doesn't happen more often?
I don't know that "trust" is the right word for the conversation that we are really trying to have... Looking at a corporation consisting of >100k employees to me means that any notion of trust is a very diffuse concept. You could talk to multiple small towns worth of humans and interact with their products & services without ever seeing the other half of the business.
I believe I "trust" (in terms I think we are using here) Microsoft more than Google - for purpose of business - simply because of decades worth of inertia and ongoing happenstance. Not because of some principled notion of good vs evil manifest as corporate anthropomorphism. Little things like "I can still directly run my 90s code on my windows 11 box" provides very strong degrees of this for me - but only in isolated scopes. Who knows what the hell the xbox or office teams are doing over in their dark corners? Blowing away all this detailed nuance for "aggregate name good/bad" is (to me) the most hilariously shitty way to go about navigating technology when working with vendors who have trillion dollar market caps.
On the other hand, I would "trust" Google to entertain me more than Microsoft via their products & services. I don't get much fun out of bing videos these days.
If I had to get one thing across to the principled crowd - Pretend like you are playing an RTS when working with megacorps. Try to zoom your mini map in just a tiny bit so you can see how the one big red square is actually a shitload of smaller ones.
It's about the kind of power they have. Microsoft cannot get GPS data from your smartphone (no one uses Windows phones anymore), Google can. Microsoft cannot get the searches you made from your smartphone (see above), Google can because, regardless of whether you're an Android or iOS user, you most likely use Google as a search engine.
Nowadays, people spend a lot more time on smartphones than they do on their personal computers. So, Google is far more powerful than Microsoft and arguably even Apple.
In my opinion, Microsoft is big and dumb, and they're evil in overt and obvious ways. Google, though, has lots of smart people, so they're cunning and evil in calculated and somewhat hidden ways.
I mentally make these distinctions with other large companies. For instance, I consider AT&T big and dumb, whereas Verizon is super evil and likely has a Department of Evil (and I wouldn't be surprised if this were actually true).
I trust Google products less than Microsoft’s primarily because Google’s primary revenue stream is ads. This means their decisions are likely influenced by their ad division. While no tech giant is entirely trustworthy, we all have relative trust levels. It all about trusting and understanding their business model.
If Google spun off their cloud division as an independent entity, I’d trust Google Cloud more than Microsoft’s offering.
Apparently the writer missed that recently Microsoft was pwned so much that China was issuing their own access to government office365 domains recently, even refuses to discuss the matter for fear of reprisal. Or being the recognized leader as a malware runtime engines with their Windows products miscreants adore since the 90's on the 98% of all pc's globally, great since the OS already spies and reports on everything you do already to Microsoft or anyone else that's taken over your system due to inherent insecurity.
Yeah, real trust-worthy.
If you've seen even passingly Microsoft's security record for the past 30 years, you'd never trust them as anything but a (sadly) necessary evil for the blissfully ignorant.
Of course Apple is now competing with Mac and IOS as the up and comers as a premium malware runtime engines, becoming as popular to infect as Windows since people have been mislead to believe it's somehow any more secure, but even just an iMessage received can infect.
When I was a kid I’d spend time on these phpbb forums where people would argue about Nintendo vs Sony. Later that included microsoft too.
Now it seems I have learned nothing since now I’m on forums where people are arguing microsoft vs Google vs Apple.
“No company is your friend”, is what I’d say as a kid, and is what I’ll say now too. It must be something about human nature that creates this behavior.
What does it even mean to trust a company? What is it that you trust about them? I trust that they'll fire and replace every single employee with AI when they can. They will grow vast fields of humans, like in the movie The Matrix, to power their AGI, if they will get away with it (they're not really humans because they were grown, not born).
Weeks ago, I was enjoying lunch and good talk with my long time tech buddies. We're all Linux nerds, infosec adjacent, and we've been doing this shit since the early 90s at least.
Before we parted for the evening, I had one question lingering in my head; none of us "trusts" a corporation. We each have a healthy dislike of Apple, Microsoft, and Google. But I had to ask: balls to the wall, if the end of the world was on the line and you absolutely had to pick a corporation to get cozy with, who would you reluctantly bed with?
Each of us had no choice but to go with Apple.
I was surprised as anyone, but the other two had somehow simply grown that much less in our estimation. (I had to agree, and I friggin hate Apple. ;))
Don't forget, we're talking hypothetically here. In reality they can all get stuffed.
I use GMail and Android. My job makes me use MSTeams, but I would've never used it if I had a choice. I probably use random bits of code contributed by both big companies to various programs on Linux... but this is about it.
Also, the reason for me to use GMail is that I want to stick with the same email address, and migrating from GMail would've made it very painful. I use Android because the alternative is to use iPhone, which is even worse. If a free alternative becomes more realistic to use, I'll switch in a heartbeat.
I worked for Google (through acquisition), and I know people who worked for Microsoft. I'd never apply to work for Microsoft. At least based on the impression I've received from people who work there. Of course, there are plenty of businesses Microsoft owns but doesn't actually "run", and things are probably very uneven across the board. Same is true for Google.
So, when it comes to trust... It's obviously a very complicated subject. Different divisions in different organizations will have very different ability to generate trust. In my own experience, and when it comes to things that mattered to me throughout my career, I developed a strong distaste for anything branded with Microsoft's name just based on technical merits alone. Everything Microsoft was making for developers was designed to impress the rich people in the management who probably don't as much as own a computer. Since forever and to this day, Microsoft's products seem like idiotic ideas implemented by legions of slaves, who don't care about the outcome, but the complicated system of equally unmotivated slave drivers ensures the minimum acceptable quality.
Google, on the other hand, gives out a very different vibe: there are a lot of motivated and competent people working for the company, and on an odd day once every few years they get to make a decent product. And then they move on and the product dies.
Based on this completely personal and based on no thorough research feeling, I'd trust the first to make the worst but functional programs and the second to make programs of very uneven quality -- more of a gamble, but with much higher payoffs, if you win.
I do not like when people take a shortcut and say that ChatGPT is from Microsoft. ChatGPT is from OpenAI. OpenAI is not part of Microsoft. They made an agreement of some sort but OpenAI is not part of Microsoft.
Googles entire business model is about showing you ads, which few users actually want. When all your money comes from doing things users don't want its difficult to remain a popular trusted company.
The mistake is to trust either. The areas where one should scrutinize either may have deltas, but there is massive overlap between both (and really, all of the industry big players) on "trust"
You are comparing an organization that indiscriminately kills people for hire to a company that makes beloved electronics. You have an extremely, dangerously skewed sense of judgment and should not be taken seriously.
Is the concept of trust related to privacy somehow? Do I trust X because it won't share my data with Y? Well, that concept has been blurred to me. I live in a country where prosecutors can demand me to give them all my digital devices and the credentials to all my self-hosted and online accounts. So this fact by itself makes my trust on MS, Google or alike irrelevant from a data privacy perspective.
Binary choices are better than no choices but chasing the 'least bad' option is really a sad state.
Forcing interoperability, applying anti-trust, outlawing agressive adtech etc. are perfectly valid steps and would help create a large amount of competition and choice around technology. In such a scenario there would be also more opportunity for open source business models.
Microsoft is a known entity. I know (or expect) that my outlook.com account is heavily datamined to the fullest extent of the most permissive interpretation of the law.
Google was supposed to be not that, and so it's not that I trust Google less, it's that I don't know how much they can/can't be trusted in general.
I see exactly the same in Dutch government. Im absolutely not allowed to deploy on Google cloud, because of GDPR reasons, yet somehow Azure is never an issue.
Microsoft has been playing the government contract game for decades, and probably the biggest leeches of public money (next to some consultancies) ever existed.
While VSCode itself is open source, some of its most useful add popular Microsoft-owned extensions does not seem to be open. And I hate how reliant I am on those. The list includes remote ssh, Python etc. Without these extensions VSCode loses a lot of edge over other editors like sublime or notepad++.
What's happening is that you're falling for corporate propaganda. It's like trusting someone more, because he gives you what you want and tells you what you want to hear.
While that's extremely common nowadays, it's also fucking stupid.
I never will fully trust Microsoft for obvious reasons, but man I do sometimes snap back and look at how disgustingly closed everything has become ever since Google introduced their "guidelines" back during web 2.0 and just cringe
You can trust someone with some thing but not with another one, and someone else trusting differently. It isn't merely trusting someone more than someone else or less than someone else.
Yeah, that been a while already!! But I still use google stuff as Microsoft apps are a real a real pain to use when it come to security setups a utterly useless really!!
I don’t. I know I can trust both to do the exact same thing: spy on everything I do, turn any good products into complete garbage, and expect me to just deal with it.
Would it be incorrect to call such associating with brands/ "loving" a company more (or less) an American thing? Why even spend any moment of your finite life pondering over behaviors of random companies, let alone defending one over another?
microsoft has been trying to remake their public image to court the os devs they previously shunned
google hasn't needed to market themselves like that
feeling any sort of 'trust' towards either, outside the context of something like a legitimate business contract, seems to me like a media literacy problem
Any discussion of what happened to Google has to start with the two individuals who together still control most of the shareholders' votes and together still have (IANAL) effectively almost completely control over it, Page and Brin.
(Yes, they put someone else in as CEO: so what? Yes, they've largely disappeared from public view: so what? Page and Brin still exist and still control Google even if they have a lower profile than eg. Zuckerberg and even if they aren't jumping up and down in public like the current owner of Twitter: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence . If Sergey Brin is able to start poking around inside Google again because he's worried about competition from OpenAI https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2023/01/31/sergey-... then he's also perfectly well able to come back to scotch the Web Integrity API. The fact that he hasn't done the latter is simply a choice that he has made.)
Some people are too young to remember, and some seem to have forgotten, how much Google's rise to dominance was enabled by the perception that Page and Brin were two fine young men who could be relied on to act with restraint and a sense of public responsibility—a perception which Google itself of course encouraged. If they'd had the same public reputation as Bill Gates or Larry Ellison then the early history of would likely have been very different. (Now, more fool the rest of us for putting stock in that perception, of course, but that doesn't let Page and Brin off the hook either.)
So, what happened there? HR scandals and maybe health issues seem to have helped drive them out of public view. The end of Google's all-hands meetings also seems rather significant, though it doesn't seem clear whether it was more a cause or a consequence of other changes (Back in 2019 Steven Levy wrote "That’s why, when Google said Thank Goodness It’s Finished, it ended a lot more than a weekly meeting. Winter has come to Silicon Valley. And no beer for you." https://www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-en... , which now seems prescient.) It also looks as if they simply got bored of running Google, and seem to believe that simply running Google is beneath them. Cut off from normal life, it also seems likely that they've been radicalised by an antisocial subculture of billionaires and cent-millionaires. But others must know much better than I do.
Which products? Like Windows which collects data about you to inject ads throughout the system and resets settings that turns it off with every auto-update that you can’t permanently turn off? How noble of them to also charge people for that privilege.
I've said this before, and until I said it the first time I thought the oldies who said it were just being curmudgeonly boomer types ...
It's all cyclic. One generations hero is the next's villain, and as we all move away from the villain we find new heros, those become villains as old heroes re-invent and we all move zigzag into the future.
Just look at what happened with compiled / static vs dynamic / "productive" languages from the 90s to 2030s. It's been less of a roller coaster and more of a pendulum.
Uncritically associating "trust" with a brand is a mistake. Microsoft are no more on the side of the angels than anyone else (and are very clearly on the other side in some of the legal positions they stake out, such as their amicus brief in support of Oracle against Google in the Java case).
Pick a sports team if you must, but don't pick a brand and support them loyally. Be an interchangeable consumer, because this is how they model your behaviour anyway. Maximise that.