Maybe in other communities, but MSFT gets thrashed pretty thoroughly around here, especially when it comes to Edge and Windows. The response to this post is nothing like "meh", and what I'm seeing here is pretty typical of Edge or Windows posts these days.
Here are some of the recent posts I can find about Edge and Windows. There's no shortage of outrage and frustration:
This does not align with my experience with HN. The pitchforks were properly out and aggressively poking at Apple when Apple declared that images uploaded to the cloud would be actively scanned and reviewed for illegal content. It got to the point where Apple reversed its decision.
>It got to the point where Apple reversed its decision.
Nice?
HN users tend to use more Apple and Linux. If Microsoft gets more of a pass my guess is it's because no one expects anything from them. The opinion of many HN users about Windows and Edge is already very low.
Nobody knows what Google scans for, in which regions, at the behest of which governments. And it can change moment to moment, and nobody knows when it changes.
It’s not just marketing, News media hate Google and Facebook for controlling their top-of-funnel and generally outcompeting them in the eyeball market. They will never allow good coverage of them.
There’s also the general media trend of punching up / publishing surprising content so it gets clicks. Google especially had the reputation for being “good” for so long that any kind of expose or criticism rings as juicy and surprising. Microsoft had the reputation for being “bad” for so long that they are expected to be bad; it’s them being “good” that is surprising and gets clicks.
It’s probably because both MS and Apple actually sell products, hardware and software that used daily and the alternatives aren’t competing much, and then having these “occasional” privacy violations issues, FB/Google on the other hand, having their whole business model about selling your data. But I disagree that they (MS/Apple) get a pass, those are the reasons why some choose to use open source alternatives like linux etc.
People use to hate Microsoft because it was a monopoly. Apple was the underdog. Ultimately the MS hate was the perfect case of watch what you wish for.
Because both companies back then were actually selling stuff to users.
Then came the culture of "do not evil" and "move fast and break things". Users became product, the only clients are the advertisers. Technology was not sold, it was simply provided for "free".
This undercut the old MS monopoly which survived because of its corporate stranglehold. Apple flourished through devices and could afford to take the moral high ground on privacy.
But the political and regulatory normalization and extreme profitability of surveillance capitalism means that there is no technology company today that can afford not to be an adtech company.
If Apple does something – this is obviously the correct thing to do, and everyone should copy them.
If Microsoft does the same thing – meh, no one cares.
If Google or Meta does the same thing – pitchforks, outrage, a thousand daily top-voted blog posts detailing how terrible these companies are.
Goes to show how much of the current outrage culture is driven by marketing and perception rather than reality.