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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

People really need to resist the urge to anthropomorphize corporations. Corporate behavior is well-established science at this point. They almost always do what is in their own financial interests. "Feckless" means "lacking initiative or strength of character". Corporations have one character: Making money. Fighting the government over a few user accounts has no short-term or long-term monetary value. It doesn't even win you a PR victory because it's unclear how many people support or don't support this.

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This is what makes it interesting: banning the professional account of an employee of an organisation based in another part of the world makes the existing trust issues against that company even worse, and enhances the process of orgs in these places to move away from it. Currently microsoft is a stone pillar in the IT infrastructure in a lot of european organisations. I do not think this will be the case in 1-2 years.

So obviously microsoft will lose a lot of money in this. So if the decision is based on them making money, one has to wonder about the less obvious source of money that this decision serves.

> People really need to resist the urge to anthropomorphize corporations.

I understand where you are coming from, but this also sounds like a way to remove individual responsibility from the people that make up a corporation.

Corporations already make it impossible to hold people to account.

No responsibility should be expected when there is no accountability.

How's that making money thing going to go when Europe boycotts American tech for several decades?

As far as I know, we haven't seen widescale pull out of Europeans from American Tech companies, alot of talk but not a ton of action. Also, email is so centralized at this point between 365 and GMail, they probably figure there is nowhere to go.

Also, Europe does seem cautious about poking this tiger since Tech is critical industry and it's possible that Europe going "WE ARE DONE!" could prompt massive backlash in tariffs and such.

Microsoft has claimed in the past to want to fight for their European customers in an attempt to gain trust and not lose out on billions in their European contracts.

They did appeal a few times, but this time it seems like they're no longer interested. To be fair, Trump could probably illegally deport half the Microsoft employees to a foreign prison camp if he'd feel like it and the courts seem powerless to stop him, so I don't blame Microsoft for falling in line.

I do blame the Dutch government for being blasé about the American threat and their refusal to move away from American technology for critical infrastructure.

50% of people do not support this. That’s a made up number. Trump has barely over 40%. He is an unpopular criminal who has shown time and again he will break the law. What even makes you think a criminal like this would win an election fairly?

Trump won the majority vote in an election that brought out a huge amount of voters compared to previous elections, and Republicans won every other government body.

He's not unpopular and many people do support him, unfortunately. Best case scenario, the silent majority didn't bother to prevent Trump and his lackeys from taking over the American government.

I don't think denying Trump's popularity is going to solve anything. America spoke out in support of this guy, twice, and it'll keep doing that unless the underlying issues are tackled.

As for election fairness: I haven't seen any credible proof of large-scale election fraud, not when Biden won, not when Trump won.

I think what's missing from the 40% number is that it says nothing about how passionately the other 60% feels.

I'm not concerned about the fact that the election was close.

I'm concerned that, post election, the country is so deeply polarized. For the first time in my life, I fear there's a small but real chance that we're headed for civil war.

> Trump won the majority vote in an election that brought out a huge amount of voters compared to previous elections, and Republicans won every other government body.

For the curious, based on [1], turnout in 2024 was 63.1% of the voting eligible population, compared to 65.3% in 2020, 59.2% in 2016, and 58.0% in 2012.

[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/voter-turnou...

Which is the second largest voter turnout since VEP started being measured, exceeded only by the previous election.

Donald Trump has never won a majority vote in any public election. 49.9% is not a majority.

That's true, I shouldn't have said "majority vote", just "most voters". The tiny sliver of irrelevant candidates did prevent Trump from gaining the majority vote.

Though, as he absorbed Kennedy into his government, I would argue his current leadership gained 50.29% of the votes.

Trump won an election but the majority of his voters are anti-Israel; polls show all Republican demographics apart from boomers have a net-negative view on Israel (and a non-trivial amount are outright anti-Semitic).

70% of voting eligible Americans didn’t do the bare minimum to prevent Trump. 30% voted for him directly, and 40% couldn’t be bothered to vote at all. I’m even willing to excuse third party voters. But the Trump voters and non-voters don’t get a pass, not at all. It’s absolutely the majority of Americans.

That's a good point.

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