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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't this be about Cortana since it's Microsoft's devblog?

It's a very benign/harmless post, but kind of weird that is posted on an official Microsoft blog (even though it is a personal blog, it's also an official blog from Microsoft by a Microsoft Employee).

Big companies are so paranoid about everything that I guarantee someone in their legal team is frowning upon this.

Raymond has always made it very clear that this is his personal blog and that it's not official by any measure.

And that’s probably frowned upon by some people because the blog has all the Microsoft branding and such.

I doubt Raymond cares, it's not like they are going to fire him.

Tons of people in Microsoft use non-Microsoft hardware and software. It's not weird at all that one of their employees has experience with Alexa.

I didn’t say that’s weird. What is weird, is to give an opinion or thought on another’s company product (a competitor in several arenas) in a blog that lives under the Microsoft domain and has all the Microsoft marketing and branding.

Again, this post is harmless but since the legal departments job is basically to freak out about everything that puts the company at risk (even a tiny bit), then I’m assuming that mentioning other companies’ products is at the very least frowned upon.

It's not Microsoft's devblog. It's Raymond Chen's blog and because of (many) reasons he's pretty much allowed to write about lots of non Microsoft things.

As somebody who has followed his blog for over a decade now, it's kind of weird seeing it with the Microsoft corporate styling. It used to be pretty idiosyncratic.

Last time I went diving through the archives, a lot of the old links and images either had rotted or gotten mangled in one of the many shifts around. It's a bit sad.

I agree with you on all accounts. Perhaps I was just used to it but the old blog seemed more human somehow. This new styling is cold and looks more like a corporate announcement. I was very sad when I heard about the msdn blog migration, especially because all the old links stopped working. Even the announcement stopped working https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/iotdev/2018/10/22/blog-migr...

Anyone interested, some of Raymond's older posts are captured in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/194791.The_Old_New_Thing

I think the point is that a Microsoft employee is showing off a deficiency in Alexa.

How is this a deficiency? At most it is a very minor bug that causes no harmful effects at all.

But Cortana doesn't have that bug and/or feature.

If it was clearly about an awesome feature of Alexa, maybe that would be weird.

If it was picking on a significant bug in Alexa, then it wouldn't be very nice.

As it is, it seems to be simply finding something amusing for readers to think about, especially if they are developers and see it as an interesting corner case.

Well, Alexa works inside Cortana. You can just say "Hey Cortana, open Alexa"

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