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Comment by tomnipotent | Hacker News Reader

> They were monsters for at least 20 years

Microsoft is a company run by people, and those people have changed (the "they" you mentioned). Gates & Balmer are now nothing more than shareholders (Gates stepped down from the board in March this year). Believe it or not, it's people that determine how a company is run and the people running Microsoft today are not the people that were running it in the 80s & 90s.

Large business units with billions in revenue take years to change direction, and we've seen that clearly happen under Nadella.

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I read MiniMSFT while they were active in the 00's. The nastiness we saw continued layers down the chain of command. It wasn't just a despot at the wheel, everyone in the bus was singing road trip songs.

I will admit that it says something that Satya was able to survive inside of Microsoft during the worst parts of this, but I don't know if that says more about how amazing Satya is, or that the internal toxicity is over-reported. We all know multiple people who have reported horrible things about Amazon too, and yet there are still people who enjoy working there.

Everyone has their own version of the truth, but once bitten twice shy, and I've lost count of the bite marks. Have your truth, just keep it outside of arm's reach of my nose, thank you.

> I read MiniMSFT

And I'm sure it had zero benefit from exaggerating stories to increase readership. I've worked at companies that have been the ire of the press, and know first hand it's many degrees separated from reality.

> It wasn't just a despot at the wheel

Except it was. We've seen this consistently in leadership, including just recently WeWork, Uber and the U.S. government. When a nasty person is at top, it legitimizes nasty people everywhere else.

> We all know multiple people who have reported horrible things about Amazon too,

No, we don't actually know them. We read some news stories specifically centered around warehousing and distribution as Amazon grew from 34,000 employees in 2010 to over 1,000,000 in 2020.

The complaints about Amazon weren't all centered around warehousing and distribution. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

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