Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

This is why in my recent rant about how Microsoft could re-establish its relevance [1], one recommendation was that Microsoft differentiate itself as the only tech titan to champion a decentralized cloud. I fairly strongly feel that would be a competitive advantage.

(Of course if all self-managed security implemented on Microsoft operating systems can be subverted by the NSA, it's a moot point.)

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft

View on HN

I feel that Apple was in a unique position to do that. As we all know, they make their money from hardware and don't have much interest in taking control of users' data (beyond what is necessery for some nice vendor lock-in of course; not unlike the Microsoft of the distant past).

Better yet, they already had popular consumer hardware in place on which they could have built a decentralized cloud service: Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme. They could have just iterated on those devices.

But no, they chose instead to build that stupid, useless iCloud thing with the faux linen website. And while they were at it, made their networking hardware worse than before.

Maybe there were sound technical reasons for not going the decentralized route (like crappy bandwidth and latency, or increased complexity), but it still feels like a missed opportunity.

ha.. Talk about doing the right thing at the wrong time and wrong thing at the right time. Microsoft is pushing hard to move everything to the cloud. Office, Search, Storage - Skydrive, pretty much your entire desktop by the middle of this decade. Had they stayed put, they could have had a easy bright future.

Rule #1: Never follow your competitor in pitch dark.

Microsoft has such a good relationship with the government that its unlikely to be able to extricate itself to every accomplish that.

But doesn't Microsoft also have good relationship with other governments? Wouldn't that make them play diplomatic? If Microsoft is found inserting backdoors into their core OS, every other government using their product would dump it for something else. From a business perspective why would someone willingly take that risk?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com