If you're admin, you might have to install a driver to scrape all memory. So... one hoop to jump through :)
Caveat: you're still trapped in your hypervisor partition. Enclaves (e.g. SGX) are also protected from admin/root snooping. IIRC, this is the same as on Linux.
Your password hash is not sent over the wire. What is sent over the wire is the NTLMv2 response message. This, simplified, is: HMAC_MD5(Hash | challenge). If you want the gory details, check out MS-NLMP.
That said, a dictionary-attackable password + attacker with fast GPUs can still brute-forcing the HMAC, then attack the password hash (MD4). It's a bit harder than just banging on a simple hash, though not terrifically difficult.
Once, my wife had someone setup some sort of financial account with her email (CC, IIRC). They didn't verify the address!
My wife called and tried to do the right thing, but the people on the phone just didn't understand the concept that the email address was wrong. It simply wouldn't compute for them. Since my wife had the email address, she /must/ have been the account holder. Right?
"OneDrive for Business" is a branding disaster, as it creates a completely rational link in people's minds that it's the same as OneDrive. In reality, it's a completely different product that acts in different ways.
Calling the data gathering intrusive is a bit of a stretch. Considerable efforts are made to ensure you're anonymized and personally identifiable information is not gathered. There are people to actively work to ensure you're not "tracked" in any way.
Off-Topic: I'd be interested to see the number of people who turn off the Microsoft CEIP (terrible abbreviation), yet still use a Google id and/or accept DoubleClick cookies.
Definitely. Though I often wonder how much Google's apps strategy is a direct-compete with office for now?
I have a sneaking suspicion it's similar to Microsoft's Bing strategy. It feels like Bing was created to annoy Google and keep them focused on search. Microsoft could afford to throw a few billion at something to keep Google out of it's bread-and-butter. It feels like Google's doing the same with apps.
Of course, given enough time to gain feature parity, both GApps and Bing could be true competitors.
Unless you're adopted and you want some sort of information where you have none. In that case, isn't it prudent to attempt to gather data on your genetics?
It's extremely frustrating when doctors/nurses/PAs ask me about family history and I tell them I was adopted. It shuts out an entire channel of potentially helpful information.
A healthy organization will always "manage out" people who are not fit for the job. At Microsoft, folks are given the hint early enough that they can explore other internal options before leaving the company entirely.
Though, to be honest, if someone just can't cut it, they will leave the company.
Any Stack ranking using a Bell curve would be dumb. Nobody I'm aware of does that. Most curves look more like a Chi Square Curve, which is far more top heavy.
Support for large projects/solutions was greatly improved. VS2012 added deferred loading for some items so you can open and get into code faster.
Of course, this is purely an artifact of overly large solutions. If you've inherited any of those, as I have, it's worth the upgrade for the improved performance, IMO.
Caveat: you're still trapped in your hypervisor partition. Enclaves (e.g. SGX) are also protected from admin/root snooping. IIRC, this is the same as on Linux.