Wow, Microsoft is really pushing the wrong boundaries in every direction, isn't it? Executives must be thinking, like many before them, that Microsoft is too big to fail.
Executives only react to share price movements. If share prices are high because whatever investors think, then execs will just open another champagne bottle.
Steve Jobs was the last tech CEO who didn't care about wall street and only care about quality products and consumers saying that if customers are happy, then the share price will take care of itself. But most companies are share price first, customer later.
With the risk of sounding like I'm brushing off what you're saying (I am not) and breaking one or two rules on this forum, please read the article because it addresses your question to some degree.
For example (my emphasis in the quoted texts):
> Together they urged policymakers in 14 countries that straddle the Atlantic to take action against enshittification, arguing that it was not an inevitable process but rather the result of policy decisions.
> Policymakers were urged to double down on the enforcement of existing laws, such as those designed to protect consumers and their data, as well as work to foster greater competition in digital markets, for example through the use of public procurement processes to favour alternatives to big tech.
From the report (my emphasis in the quoted texts):
> The path we are on can be challenged and reversed – we can have a better digital world. This requires rebalancing the power between consumers, big tech companies and alternative service providers.
> The fight to disenshittify the internet is also a fight for innovation: Big Tech is able to enshittify their services after they have become dominant and restricted competition. By pruning back the excesses of big tech, alternative services can get the nourishment they need to grow and flourish. However, this requires active policy choices and vigorous enforcement of existing laws.
As you can see, it's not merely a case of building better alternatives, although that plays a role. The biggest issues stem from market dominance, preventing the emergence of new players and innovators, using existing (huge) leverage to pass preferential laws etc. This is a systemic problem, not one that "the market" should solve.
I think that normally that may be the approach (and I'm not singling out Italy for this, it probably applies to most countries).
On this occasion, however:
> In all previous cases involving other international groups, once a settlement was reached and payment made, prosecutors closed related criminal investigations, either through plea deals or by dropping the cases.
> This time, however, Milan prosecutors did not share the tax authority's approach and decided to press ahead with their probe, leading to a request that the suspects be sent to trial.
Damn, is anyone an expert that can speak to the criminal law involved here?
It’s crazy that executives can jump around the law and not face any criminal charges, then the company picks up the bill (although I’m not ignorant thinking this isn’t usual)
I’m just curious to learn more about how often this is the case and you usually what happens with people afterward
I don't know about Italian law, but in the US tax evasion is pretty difficult in many cases to prove. It is illegal in the US to deliberately defraud the IRS to evade paying taxes, it is not illegal to make a mistake, or claim a deduction you think you can claim when the IRS decides you can't, etc. So prosecutors must prove you had an intent to evade taxes you knew you owed. Because they can rarely meet that bar, criminal charges are rarely brought.
it's for the civil part. (so you need to show the tax office some paper trail that you based your filings on. invoices, bills, contracts, emails, receipts. and if they are formally okay, then the tax agency has to show that they are just fake papers.)
as far as I understand the criminal part still considers intent and so on (and has a higher standard for burden of proof), but if you file for VAT return and then you have zero invoices (and so the numbers simply don't add up) the court can easily find that there was intent to defraud the state. (and then sentencing is based on the amount of damages.)
This very much reads like that Economist hit piece that was complaining about how worker protections are but an abomination that needs doing away with, because what's the point in protecting anything at all if wealth is not generated? Naïve, if we're being generous.
I haven't spent too much time on it, so there's a good chance that I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem to be satire. I think that it's merely depressing and predatory, or depressing and predatory because it's a cynical sales pitch - a conversion funnel - that conflates what could be deemed to be real risks (supply-chain attacks etc.) with major exaggerations. They probably worked with a PR agency to devise this approach and thought that is was a very clever way to capture the attention of this exact community - which it may very well happen if it spurs a heated discussion and people end up mentioning their brand name and visiting their site.
To be clear, engineers should not be required in the least to "maintain mental maps of which packages are safe and which will detonate their employer's IP strategy" simply because in the vast majority of cases they're not co-owners of that business or that strategy. That is overstated and intentionally misleading, I suspect. AGPL obligations depend on how software is combined and distributed or network-served, not on some magical "contamination" event from merely touching a package.
I think that this was somewhat obvious to many in the last 10 years or so. There's no reason to fault them for that and, in all fairness, there are few corporate clients on here - or even online, considering Microsoft's market share for certain products and services - that complain about the quality of Microsoft's services and products.
What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.
At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.
As an enterprise admin of Microsoft services I think they're pretty mediocre. Their stuff is always behind the state of the art. It's just good enough to not go for a third party option that isn't included in their bundle pricing. But it never really satisfies, it's always got this 'make do' feeling about it.
The single pane of glass thing is nice but I don't think it's really something you can't do without. I think what really cements them in the enterprise market is their ability to deep discount their bundles.
It's very hard with third party vendors to compete with that. You're not gonna pay $10 per user per month for zoom or slack when you can have teams included in the bundle you're already paying, even if it's not quite as good.
It's like IKEA. It's cheap, it does the job and for that reason almost everyone has it, but I wouldn't call it quality.
Unsure why @Nathanf22's comment was downvoted to death. I would also suggest Lobste.rs and Reddit. But then again, RSS seems to work quite well in my case.
Probably because it seems AI-generated, and suggesting dev.to is in line with that - that place is actually an absolute cesspit of slop (SNR 1:100), as far as I have seen.
In the meantime I've bookmarked quite a few more on literature, politics, and such, if it's of any interest. I've also made (a fairly weak) case for Jacobin here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309069
Account created 16 hours ago, negative karma. Four comments fearmongering about brigading, praising Trump, Israel, right wing politics and one criticising Reddit for being leftist.
I know those pesky workers and people without capital are so annoying asking for Healthcare and consumer protections... I wish they just worked for the billionaire oligarchs without compliant.
Oh, it's even 'better' than that. To quote from an article in the Guardian:
It’s a short book but if you read it you’ll see that a decent editor could have got it down to one sentence. “When we seek to protect the vulnerable we limit the freedom of the rich and the privileged – and that is a disgrace.”
It’s a wretched read – a series of assertions and hunches freed from the chains of argument or evidence, with the intellectual rigour of a YouTube conspiracy rant. The prose occasionally soars to the level of clickbait, as in its most famous sentence: “The British are among the worst idlers in the world.” Most of its authors are now cabinet ministers in a government that no one would call exactly Stakhanovite.
To be fair they're ex cabinet ministers. The current shambles are Labour and that book was written by Tories. But you're correct that they weren't exactly Pick of the Bunch Tories, Liz Truss in particular has the unenviable distinction of having been Prime Minister for such a short period that a lettuce famously outlasted her.
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