At offices I worked where swears were "ok", where even the CEO or other upper management were dropping F-bombs, it was still against the "rules" to call a person a "fuckface".
Generally expletives are/were ok when stuff like tests fail, deploys fail, etc..
Calling a person a "douchebag" or "shithead" was not OK.
"We're building fucking cool shit!" -- OK
"Our PM is a useless asshole. Fucking prick!" -- Not OK
Given all the other points in life where, despite my awareness, I don't have much choice, how is an AI just directing me really any different?
My culture, education and skills limit what work I can do.
Our culture places limits on a vast number of experiences. On the road and the only thing is fast food? Welp, eating fast food. Live somewhere that only has one grocery store or cable provider?
I don't really see AI in the form Google is peddling as really all that much different. We're just 'more aware' that the world around us is really guiding us.
I may be somewhere new, and can only see the immediate surroundings without a lot of exploring. And let's be real, in the US, most cities are the same when it comes to restaurants/hotels and such. There are differences in culture but we don't usually see them if we're just visiting. Not in a way that matters.
Google will let me know that the things I prefer back home? there are equivalents nearby.
Fencing ourselves in is what we do. Who knows, perhaps a digital assistant would help us stick to our personal goals and decisions better. Rather than just having to accept what's there.
For example, early-90s, me growing up in the sticks. Poor people were busted for growing/selling pot. It was reasonably their only choice, there were no jobs. 19 year old gets his car confiscated, and loses his job. Has no way to support his new wife/baby. It just happened to be at the house where the pot was being grown. He did not live there. This kid gets hit with a felony, now he'll never get a job.
Meanwhile, 20 year old son of local construction company owner gets his plants confiscated, and a few hundred in tickets.
Everyone involved here was white. Judge, poor family growing pot, and the family that owned the construction company. The only difference is poor rednecks versus rich rednecks.
Sure, as far as we know, MS and Apple have been in the public eye as being against government overreach. I suspect it's less about protecting customers from the government and more about protecting themselves, though.
But one needs their hands and toes to count the other areas in which Microsoft and Apple have conducted themselves... poorly?
Apple in the poaching employees lawsuit. Spurious lawsuits over "design" (ie rounded corners on rectangles) trademarks. Colluding with music execs to push customers to their streaming music service (instead of ad supported "free" streaming on labels sites). Since this is about a CEO hate, Steve Jobs was a complete asshole by a number of accounts. Horribly abusive.
Microsoft... well their track record should be well established. The absolute worst of which was releasing a mass market OS that was egregiously insecure by default (yet, around here, the conversation often is "I wish MS tested like they did back in the day." when webcams break, but I digress). Again, the CEO thing, Ballmer was borderline incompetent, Gates was involved in a number of shady market capture schemes.
But you know, because in this one context of government over-reach, they did a bit better than Yahoo!, the parents position that they're all untrustable is complete nonsense.
The only thing "wrong" Marissa did was not make a shit ton of money for Yahoo! No one would give this story another thought if Yahoo!'s stock was worth $100 more than it was when she started.
That's about all MS and Apple have done "right". That end justified the means.
Every IT department in the world is a bit dramatic, since I have direct experience working with a couple +1 million user consumer facing companies that have a couple Windows laptops around for IE testing, but that's it.
Ballmer takes over with momentum on his side; XP is still going up, Windows Mobile is shit but other than Blackberry the only other player in town, Xbox launches to huge success.
When he leaves their mobile platform is effectively DOA, their cloud services are years behind AWS and Google, their consumer base is being eaten by Apple portables, and the last Xbox product he oversaw is getting its ass handed to it.
They just added bash to Windows to keep/attract folks that aren't developing for their platform anymore.
I don't think it is all Ballmer's fault. The world got wise to their scams from the past to some extent; no more shifty deals with the governments around the world calling you a monopolist.
Google rose to power, and Apple got their shit together.
Revenue went up in some spots, though how much of that is real or due to creative accounting (it's well known they shift Xbox losses around to obscure the real numbers), but if not for their huge war chest of cash (thanks to shady business practices), MS would be done.
I tend to lean on the "Do people feel that way? Or are we told to feel that way?"
Let's not pretend we're making our decisions on these things in some kind of vacuum.
We're battered with "buy this, support the economy, drive your car" propaganda. How much of the 24/7 news cycle is dedicated to intelligently discussing the environment? Not much.
How much is spent detailing what companies are up, which ones are down, and oh shit did you hear about BrAngelina getting divorced? We're told that is the important stuff and let others worry about this other stuff.
It's too hard for me to accept that we have a democracy that actually cares about the concerns of the people. It all just feels like a ballot stuffed online poll.
Interestingly, despite Thinkpads being the best at running Linux over the years, they never officially supported it. At some point they began cracking down on it.
At last job, we had to wipe machines back to the version of Windows that came with them in order to get Lenovo to honor the NBD support we paid for, even when it was obviously not a software glitch (displays dying or DVD drives not reading discs in any OS). We kept a couple spare hard drives around with vanilla Windows installs for this reason.
We were pretty excited when Dell started shipping their Developer models. Told Lenovo to pound sand when it came time to refresh.
Generally expletives are/were ok when stuff like tests fail, deploys fail, etc..
Calling a person a "douchebag" or "shithead" was not OK.
"We're building fucking cool shit!" -- OK
"Our PM is a useless asshole. Fucking prick!" -- Not OK