[politelemon]

This is incredibly narrow black and white view, it's full of mental gymnastics, leaping to conclusions and putting words in their mouths. I know that HN is collectively biased against MS, but this particular piece is poorer than usual.

The original premise for getting away from their services is the PRISM slide. Microsoft is one organization in that list. The others are Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple. To focus on one and pretty much leap into blaming them for ICE's abuses is unobjective and incredibly biased. ICE does not exist in a technological vacuum devoid of FB, iPhones, and Skype.

If author truly cares they should either drop all companies mentioned or do the civil thing and be objective in their assessment. I predict that the likely conclusion will be: all large companies are complicit and that it's entirely a gray area. It's entirely possible to be good and evil at the same time.

Large companies often work as a loose collection of departments most of whom don't know what anyone else is doing (the nature of growth), so they end up with situations where leadership has certain focus topics and some management has other focus topics. What changes over time is marketing and the narrative that companies want to push out.

[zzo38computer]

I have no problem with Microsoft selling PowerPoint to the military (although it does not mean I endorse Microsoft, or PowerPoint, or the military; I merely mean that if someone is selling a product and some customer wishes to buy it, then they can do that). It is not the provider's fault what the customer is doing with the products, I should think.

But, their collaboration with NSA for illegal mass spying, is certainly a bad thing to do. They have "been letting the feds read whatever they like out of it without a warrant for the last dozen years", which is no good, and especially if their terms of service does not mention this. (But even if they mentioned in their terms of service, this still doesn't make it good.)

"It's entirely possible to be good and evil at the same time." Yes, I believe that, and unfortunately, too often people ignore this.