Microsoft Is Now the 'Adult In the Room' Among Big Tech, Says Seattle Congresswoman (yahoo.com) 91
As Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google are being targeted by the House Judiciary Committee for abusing American antitrust law, one major company has managed to escape the glare: Microsoft. That's because they are now "the adult in the room in some ways on this issue," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.), a Democratic member of the House Antitrust subcommittee, which has been diving into Big Tech's practices for the last 16 months. Yahoo Finance reports: Jayapal's Seattle district includes Amazon's headquarters and the company's practices, specifically how it uses data from third-party sellers, has been one of her major focuses. It's Congress's job to make sure "a company like Amazon can't just put a small business that produces diapers out of business by taking all of that market information that nobody else has access to, and using it to subsidize losses and push small companies out," Jayapal told Yahoo Finance.
She has also had a less-than-cordial relationship with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. During a Yahoo Finance interview this summer, Jayapal said she had never before met the billionaire. They did talk virtually in July when she grilled him during the hearings, but she said this week that communication since then has been sparse. "I've had an open door policy to speaking with Mr. Bezos and have invited him many times," she said. Though she has met with Amazon senior managers.
"The lesson here is self-regulation doesn't work," said Jayapal. She points to Microsoft as an example that Amazon should follow, of successfully working with the government. In 1998, Microsoft was the subject of Congressional antitrust inquiries and many wanted to break the company up. In the end, Bill Gates was able to avoid a breakup by promising to change his company's ways. The company had to "change its culture, change its lines of business," Jayapal said. The process of government involvement led to Microsoft creating a "platform for other small companies to thrive," she said. Jayapal also pointed to the Microsoft example as to why breaking up a company isn't always the best option. "Perhaps in retrospect, Amazon, after we've regulated them, after we've put through some of the recommendations that are in the report, we'll look back and say, "You know what? It's a good thing that that happened," she said.
She has also had a less-than-cordial relationship with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. During a Yahoo Finance interview this summer, Jayapal said she had never before met the billionaire. They did talk virtually in July when she grilled him during the hearings, but she said this week that communication since then has been sparse. "I've had an open door policy to speaking with Mr. Bezos and have invited him many times," she said. Though she has met with Amazon senior managers.
"The lesson here is self-regulation doesn't work," said Jayapal. She points to Microsoft as an example that Amazon should follow, of successfully working with the government. In 1998, Microsoft was the subject of Congressional antitrust inquiries and many wanted to break the company up. In the end, Bill Gates was able to avoid a breakup by promising to change his company's ways. The company had to "change its culture, change its lines of business," Jayapal said. The process of government involvement led to Microsoft creating a "platform for other small companies to thrive," she said. Jayapal also pointed to the Microsoft example as to why breaking up a company isn't always the best option. "Perhaps in retrospect, Amazon, after we've regulated them, after we've put through some of the recommendations that are in the report, we'll look back and say, "You know what? It's a good thing that that happened," she said.
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Re: What a joke (Score:2)
I think slack would agree too as they're currently facing anticompetitive efforts from Microsoft.
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You mean Slack feels that they are currently facing anti-competitive efforts from Microsoft. Just because they are accusing Microsoft of such actions doesn't necessarily make it true.
Re:What a joke: Parody Inversion Point (Score:2)
https://dilbert.com/strip/2019... [dilbert.com]
Re:What a joke (Score:5, Informative)
In 1998, Microsoft was the subject of Congressional antitrust inquiries and many wanted to break the company up. In the end, Bill Gates was able to avoid a breakup by promising to change his company's ways.
Except that's not what happened. Microsoft avoided being broken up because George W. Bush was elected president, and the people he appointed killed the antitrust investigation.
Re:What a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Their definition of "adult" means "does what we, personally, want", it doesn't mean "good for the country" or "good for the market". It's definitely doesn't mean competent at IT.
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Maybe they mean that Microsoft is the adult who snuck into the dressing rooms of the Miss Teen USA pageant to check out the contestants.
Re:What a joke (Score:4, Insightful)
To me, I see "adult" to mean, yeah, they're evil bastards, but only in the software world. The other three extend into many other parts of life, especially when it comes to censorship of information.
Plus, Microsoft is somewhat less evil than they used to be, mostly because they've started running out of ways to abuse their monopoly power.
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In politics, it is akin to how someone agreeing with a politician on a course of action is acting appropriately and doing things right and behaving according to common sense or decency or any number of 'non-political' guiding principles. If someone disagrees with you, then they are shamelessly politicizing something that shouldn't be political.
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The anger is strong with this one.
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Seriously? Microsoft, the adult in the room? What a laugh that is.
MS is still the retarded kid in the room when it comes to technology itself.
Recently I had need to unsubscribe from a Skype account that I was no longer using, Apparently the only way to unsubscribe from Skype is to delete your entire Microsoft account. What's an Apple user doing with a Microsoft account? I have been using it to keep in contact with my club's OneDrive vault. So I deleted the account, waited for a couple of weeks, and then signed up for a new one to reconnect with my organization. Only I cou
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Bitwarden is a password manager, which has zero relevance to my problem with the Microsoft account.
Re: What a joke (Score:2)
Love you, Jayapal, but you're wrong. Microsoft is not "the adult in the room". They couldn't be bigger hypocrites! They've managed to dodge or manipulate most of the antitrust fines that have been thrown at them. And, frankly, the software industry was molded by Bill Gates to be like this. Apple got burned by Microsoft in the home computer market. So when everything went mobile, they said, "Fine. Fuck you." You don't get to claim the high ground when you dug the trench everyone else is sitting in! Microsoft
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Well, then maybe the headline should read "Microsoft is best at playing the adult in the room".
They've certainly become better at P.R.. And in their attempts to compete with Amazon and Google, have become fairly decent actors as far as (server-based) Linux goes. I think they're still collecting patent bounties from Android device makers on stupid patents, though, so they're still gaming the system. And of course, the way they handled the whole Open Document Format thing in Europe was hideous. Maybe that
I see them more as the "old patient in the asylum" (Score:5, Funny)
Windows 10 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows 10 (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Windows 10 (Score:5, Informative)
A quick glance at OpenSecrets shows your wonderings to be accurate. https://www.opensecrets.org/me... [opensecrets.org] Though it does make sense that she would get a lot of tech donations, given where her district is. She's the one who led Seattle's Fight for $15 min. wage law past the Republican and Democratic party objections.
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I think Jaypal is more concerned with public discourse on social media platforms and monopolistic mistreatment of non-tech competitors that rely on these monopoly platforms than she is on tech itself. That's an understandable focus - and given that she probably can't speak with any authority on tech-specific issues, it might even be commendably humble.
Compare that to the idiots that are supporting Oracle's "Java headers" copyright suit against Google. They either don't understand software - or are pretend
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The abusive adult (Score:5, Insightful)
Who got away with years of abusing everybody around whilst everyone was forced to put up with them.
Adult in the room (Score:1)
MS business practices have improved... (Score:2, Insightful)
... however their software has gone the other way in an ergonomic sense whether talking about Windows or Office. Useful features removed, features only a focus group wants added in, commonly used features hidden away and in some cases just wierd functionality (eg Outlook hiding mail based on what it thinks is focused or "other" - sorry, *I'll* decide whats for me important thanks).
Re:MS business practices have improved... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a developer their software has gotten WAY better for me. WSL1, WSL2, windows terminal, cascadia code, visual studio linux, python, etc support, openssh built in for client and server and visual studio code. Soon we are going to have gpu agnostic gpgpu acceleration for tensorflow along with gui linux apps transparently supported.
No other system is remotely as productive for me as windows 10 is for me right now and I have been programming computers for a long time now. I used a linux desktop for over 15 years and it has never been as productive for me as windows is right now. I have also used OS/2 3 and 4, windows since 3.x, dos, etc.
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I presume that when you write, "OS/2 3 and 4" you are in fact referring to OS/2 Warp 3 (released October 1994) and OS/2 Warp 4 (released September 1996)?
I have to ask because it would be easy to mis-read what you have written here and think you are imagining fictional operating systems like OS/3 and OS/4...
And whilst I would certainly be happy to concede that Windows 10 hits your productivity sweet-spot, I'm not entirely sure it tr
Re:MS business practices have improved... (Score:5, Informative)
I use OS/2 Warp 3 installed from floppy disks with the windows 3.11 compatibility (and the win32s thing that ms kept breaking) and later OS/2 Warp 4 from a cd install. I did not use any of the versions from eComstation released later. I also used to play galactic civilizations on it from stardock and used object desktop.
The NT series kernels has actually seen fairly major changes. with XP64 and earlier the cpu performance on more than 4 cores was quite bad compared to Linux. I would normally see about 20% faster performance with Linux. I would also much better memory usage on large memory systems with Linux. Between Vista and Windows 7 most of those issues where addressed and by Windows 10 I don't find any performance difference for cpu intensive simulations on Linux vs windows.
I have not benchmarked gpgpu between windows and Linux but on the Linux side I had the problems that sometimes TensorFlow would crash and it looked like the crash happened somewhere in cuda which then caused the nvidia driver to crash and take the Linux desktop with it. With windows when I have had it crash instead the desktop blinks a few times and the nvidia driver is auto reloaded and all other software keeps running. So while doing profiling and debugging I find windows more reliable than Linux for gpgpu.
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I'm not sure quite what it is with hardware drivers, but GNU/Linux seems to have a quite variable set of results. In earlier days, things like adoption of USB happened way ahead of and more smoothly than for Windows, for example.
But as you rightly point out, things got tricky with more complex drivers. nVidia offer binary-only content and guard the details of their code jealously. I run Mint 20 on three machines: A Ryzen 5 3400; an older Intel i7 7700T - both of which have
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"Microsoft made a significant paradigm-shifting improvement in their OS platform was the adoption of Dec VMS code"
This is a factually incorrect claim. There is literally no VMS code inside any Microsoft operating system. None. Zilch. Nada. In case you still believe in your claim, please provide citation from a believable source.
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Unquestionably Microsoft is treating developers targeting things other than .NET and Win32 better than they ever have. What don't you have on Linux at this point though?
I am generally curious, I am targeeting .Net Core and running MSSQL on Linux now, on my development workstation and I can't imagine putting up with the Windows UI, Update process, haphazard software package management situation, and general opacity of windows anytime something either goes slightly awry or I want to do something outside the
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For C++ and Python I have not run into a better IDE than Visual Studio 2019 (not VScode). I have tried so many different IDEs and I find that has worked much better for me, especially with debugging. I also find the desktop is more reliable since if I am doing something with GPGPU and it crashes for some reason windows will just reload the driver and keep the desktop running while with linux I lose x.org and everything running under it.
I don't find the windows UI causes me any problems and I have never had
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"WSL1, WSL2, windows terminal, cascadia code, visual studio linux, python, etc support, openssh built in for client and server and visual studio code"
WSL - sorry, don't see the point. Want linux? Use linux.
Terminal - available in unix since the 60s. BFD.
Python - thats nothing to do with MS
openssh - available in unix since the 90s. MS playing catch up yet again. Plus the server is failry useless on windows where most things are run by the gui.
VS Code - used it. And what? Its a cut down IDE. Again BFD.
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Broadly speaking, I think it's just a sentiment that MS used to make it difficult to interoperate with anything other than first-party stuff. When faced with overwhelming feedback that their hopelessly limited CMD was just torture compared to bash+gnu experience, and remote execution was so much easier with ssh, another company might have gone and embraced either that or a BSD set of counterparts. But Microsoft? They made Powershell and a different scheme entirely for powershell remoting and said 'we are st
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"while their Terminal is much improved, it still can't even hold a candle to the humble Konsole or Gnome-Terminal." OK, I'll bite; what do these have that the MS Terminal doesn't?
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Generally, Terminal continues to be glitchy. They are fixing and improving over time, but they seem to either have to or have chosen to manually do a lot of sizing and placement so they have done things like maximized to larger than the screen, behaved different on single monitors vs multiple monitors.
Feature wise, it is totally tab focused, while Konsole and Gnome Terminal can spawn new windows or new tabs with distinct keystrokes from each.
Terminal still can't render certain things correctly (e.g. some VT
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"WSL - sorry, don't see the point. Want linux? Use linux." That IS the point; Linux is in Windows, so I can use Linux when I want to, and Windows itself when I want to. So I (as a user of wsl 2) have the best of both worlds.
BTW, I've been running Linux-based guis for a long time, using vcxsrv. Eventually wsl will get its own X server, so they say.
Re: MS business practices have improved... (Score:2)
Its not in windows, it's just an API mapper no different to Wine. It's like putting a ferrari body on a ford.
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"As a developer their software has gotten WAY better for me"
As a former developer in the MS space I can assure you there was only one direction for it to go.
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I will agree with that. Developing stuff on windows used to seriously suck. Some of the stuff I work on run on Linux and Windows and the windows side used to take so much effort to get it to work. However, over the last few years it has actually gotten easier to do a lot of the stuff on windows than it is on linux. I would never have imagined MS would clean up their stuff this much. I can even trivially spin up many different linux versions faster and easier than I can on linux and I still have all the file
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Like the persistence of Cortana? Flag as spam... Block sender... it doesn't matter.
She'll be in your inbox again in a week or two!
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Yes about Office in general, but I'm puzzled about what you mean by Outlook hiding mail, or deciding what's important. Where does it do that?
(Telling me what's important is one of my pet peeves with GMail; it creates a folder labeled "Important" and sticks whatever it thinks I need to know about there. I did find a way to disable that behavior.)
they had to get rid of Ballmer first (Score:2)
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They had to get rid of Bill too. The company was founded on sharp business practices.
Really? You gotta' be kidding ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is using their entire monopoly power over the Windows operating system and the fact that many companies use Office365 in the Cloud to get companies to shift to Azure.
Not only are they trying to throw in free licenses and steep discounts (only to later, maybe over the course of a year to tighten the screws again and "discount" turns into "more cost") for Windows/Office that no other cloud provider can match, but at the same time they constantly tighten the Windows License rules either limiting a company what licenses they can bring (BYOL) to their preferred cloud provider or directly limiting the cloud provider what Windows license and, more importantly, how they can "re-sell" as part of their offering.
IMHO (and as a minimum, short of breaking MS up), Windows/Office should be licensed under RAND like terms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing) as its often done for hardware standards to make sure the playing field is even between a number of competing providers.
Significant difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple, on the other hand, blackmailed me yet again, earlier TODAY, forcing me to agree to a new revenue sharing contract with them, even though my brick and mortar business does not sell digital products and my app is free. Fuck Apple. Every couple of months they force a new "legal" agreement on me. I have to agree to their new offer, no matter what terms they give, or I can no longer continue to have an app on Apple devices.
I hope the justice dept obliterates Apple, because they are extortionist scumbags, worse than MS ever was at its peak.
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Sadly, that's more a statement on which companies are experiencing success more than their sincere wishes as to how they'd want to operate their business.
If roles were reversed, Apple would be bending over backwards to please customers and partners and MS would be the one deciding to screw over everyone for their profit.
In short, we need more competitive marketplace if we hope to have any 'good' players in the market at a given time. Sadly the market is consolidating vendors left and right to reduce competi
She would say that wouldn't she (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is based in Washington State and guess who she represents...
It would be newsworth if she said something totally the opposide.
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So is Amazon, and she goes after them pretty hard.
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The reason for that is, Microsoft gives her generous campaign contributions.
Amazon Abuses It's 3rd Party Sellers (Score:1)
The stuff they make them go through is absurd.
If a buyer returns a product used or completely broken (or a box of rocks), you have to refund them 50%, and in some cases you still get an A-Z claim/derogatory mark on your account.
Buyers can choose any reason for returns. Bought the wrong part for your car? Just say it was defective, or didn't match the site description, so the seller has to pay return shipping. And if the seller withholds return shipping, file an A-Z claim. Another derogatory mark.
Now, th
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If I went through other retailers, I would most likely have no way to dispute let a
Twitter, not Apple (Score:3)
The summary doesn't mention Twitter at all, and they are still in hot water. Apple was questioned by congress over its 30% fee for its app store, and that is over with. Facebook, Google and Twitter now have to take part in additional Senate hearings over all the various monopolistic and privacy issues. They are at risk of being broken up or having more privacy laws forced on them, but Apple is not in that boat.
Ballmer (Score:2)
If they are indeed the adult in the room then they have certainly come a long way since Ballmer.
If they are its by accident (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me Microsoft adulthood isnt so much a function of their own 'growth in culture' but just where they ended up in the market place.
A lot of the criticism of their competitors seems to be strait up do the motivations they have, that Microsoft does not. At the end of the day, the advertising components of those other business are cancers that afflict their choices made around their other offerings.
Microsoft missed the boat pretty much on the social media game, to the point they had to buy LinkedIn, which has a niche but as far as social media in general - its an also ran.
They got more or less booted out the mobile market entirely. They maintain a tenuous grasp at least as far as the US market goes via their Nokia ties but describing MS mobile offerings as an also ran at this point would be charitable. .NET runs a lot of the web, but in order to maintain that position they were mostly forced to support it on Non Windows platforms because they were late to the party when it came to the Cloud.
Azure is second to AWS when it comes to the world of public facing applications and commerce. Much of the interest seems to be in its SASS offerings AzureAD, o365, sharepoint, etc; and the appeal there is to customers with a long legacy of NT and ADS domains with Windows work stations environments. New business are just as likely to chose Google's collaboration and office tools. Again appears to be as much about stopping people from jumping ship as anything. Its certainly not the goto for commerce applications and revenue generators.
So as much as Microsoft is playing well with others; it feels like it was their only choice for staying in the game. I don't think it was some organic enlightenment on their part, and I strongly suspect if they had the option going back to being the undisputed industry leaders in these spaces and levering that to stay that way they would. Its just they miss read the trends in the market places often enough others got the levers they needed to force their hands.
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"Microsoft missed the boat pretty much on the social media game, to the point they had to buy LinkedIn"
Microsoft literally missed the boat with the INTERNET.
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It was funny, just as the likes of Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL started to have their walled gardens eroded by the internet, *that's* when MS said 'you know, let's start a new walled garden online service without much regard for internet!'
The started competing with AOL at AOL's game when it was clear that days were numbered for that sort of strategy..
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MS should still be embarrassed at how long Windows needed winsock.
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I'd agree to an extent here... But how heavily is a company like Amazon invested in "social media"? For that matter, what has it really done for Google? (Their attempt at Google Groups didn't exactly take the world by storm.)
I've only worked for one of these big tech companies, so everything else I'm about to say here is just based on my opinion. But I think Microsoft has an advantage in the sense they've already been through the wringer with a DOJ battle over being a "monopoly" and learned more about wh
Dear moderators: (Score:2)
I will keep saying as long as the kids keep saying that MS "changed".
You don't have the mod points to stop it.
Which government? (Score:3)
MS lost an antitrust case and was ordered to be broken up. No wonder, they were guilty as hell, using every trick in the book.
They then appealed and somehow ended up still being convicted but with few sanctions... Now that was weird.
Then afterwards EU took them to court over the media player. MS tried to drag that out, but lost the appeal, was fined several big sums of money and finally started complying. When EU later investigated browsers, MS actually made a deal and implemented the browser choice thing.
IMHO, the case with MS illustrated that if you're dealing with a big bully not intent on complying, nothing short of enforcing the law will help.
And that you probably need to do this from somewhere that is not that big bully's home turf. Because otherwise that big bully will find a way to thwart the enforcement.
Bezos not bending the knee (Score:1)
How quickly folks forget (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft embodies monopoly, misuse of market share, distortion of markets, choking other companies' air supply. They're a convicted monopolist. Oh it's a SEATTLE person who said this? Sure it makes more sense now.
Self-regulation can work (Score:3)
... if there's a credible threat of government investigation, intervention, and regulation in the offing, which there never is when companies are left to regulate lucrative but abusive practices.
Expecting companies to do the right thing when they can get away with the wrong thing is naïve. It might work for a little while, but sooner or later somebody would break ranks, and then everyone else would plead competitive necessity.
So now we know where her donors work (Score:1, Funny)
MS monopoly playing with fire (Score:3)
How so? A monopoly on business desktops limits competition and carries big risks. The next MS CEO could be a big jerk. Nadella has been relatively tame I agree, but if replaced by a jerk, there is no timely Plan B for many orgs. All the business eggs are in one basket.
Imagine if there were no Windows (Score:3)
Think about how much time is wasted by Windows doing what it wants to do rather than what the user wants to do. Then think about how cumbersome and inconsistent the UX is and how much time is wasted dealing with that. Then think about how much time is wasted dealing with nefarious activities. Put a dollar figure on that. Then thing about how much money is wasted buying products to deal with nefarious activities.
Re: Imagine if there were no Windows (Score:1)
just late? (Score:2)
Bought and paid for corporate tool (Score:2)
Go talk to Seattle City Council woman Kshama Sawan and see if she agrees with you.
Go talk to Zephyr Teachout and see if she agrees with you. Perhaps read her book "Break 'em Up".
Rep. Pramila Jayapal is a fucking moron.
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She's called for the nationalization of Microsoft, is that what you're referring to? I guess that fits with the fact that "Sawant is a member of the Marxist[58] Socialist Alternative party, the United States section of the Trotskyist international organization the International Socialist Alternative." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kshama_Sawant)
As an aside, she wants "to see privately owned housing in 'Millionaire's Row' in the Capitol Hill neighborhood turned into publicly owned shared housing complex".
Haha seattle supports seattle (Score:1)
So, let's see, a Seattle congressperson thinks the best company is the one in Seattle. Surely merely a coincidence.
Revisionist History (Score:2)
Representative Jayapal was obviously not paying the least bit of attention to Microsoft during the antitrust hearings. I don't think she was even living in Seattle back then - but, if she was, her focus was completely elsewhere (I'm not saying that is a bad thing; it's just how it was).
Look, I believe Microsoft has, to a degree, changed over the last 20 years. But they didn't change - at all - back then, and it wasn't some promise to change that actually got them off the hook. No, Microsoft followed the tim
Said someone from Seattle (Score:1)
Coming up with a statement like that about Microsoft...
It is akin to the DNC declaring Nancy Pelosi as sane, or Trump declaring, well, most anything.
What?! (Score:3)
Microsoft is back to their tricks (which actually never stopped, just now accelerated beyond their former tactics).
A billion+ strong (Score:1)
Political contributions (Score:1)
See, paying politicians big bucks over the years, wining and dining them has paid off. They've reached that coveted "adult" status.
Now they can release the hounds!
Bread (Score:2)
Whose bread one eats, whose word one speaks.