Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Windows 8: What the Rest of the World Thinks


Recently on a Microsoft run web site and Windows 8 blog I ran across a reply to an article written by a Dutch IT consultant.

It summarizes what I have glanced from many, many similar comments I have read. I have modified some language and grammar quirks and fixed some misspelled words to convey the meaning correctly and in correct English.
Yes  it's true; Microsoft wants us to massively migrate to Microsoft based cloud based services. But in my country that will not happen as Microsoft wants it, especially   because these "virtual cloud services" are to 85% physically located within the USA.  
That is for most foreign people simply unacceptable. It's not only for reasons like privacy, piracy, taxes, company secrets - there is also a difference in mind-sets.
What if our sensitive data sits there in a physical data center somewhere in the US of A, and 'shit' really starts happening, like for instance war, wide spread diseases, natural disaster, terrorism attack, you name it -  anything could happen anywhere.
Foreigners don't trust CIA/FBI/NSA that much, we learned from the past months.
My customers are saying..., even refusing, to migrate their financial and sensitive business data to somewhere in the 'Microsoft' or even  the 'Amazon cloud'; abroad, unknown where it really is, in a far away foreign country, and nobody knows, or even checks what is happening to their data. It may be leaked to the NSA, via a built-in back door when Micro$oft sold this opportunity to the NSA/US-Government.
 No, sorry, not with us!  We aren't like that!
We even don't come close to this kind of behavior.
Yes, people in other countries don't trust their sensitive data into American hands; they approach privacy questions with a totally different mind set.

Maybe Microsoft's management better begin to acknowledge that not everybody will follow to where they, Microsoft and others, want to lead us?

What may be good for Microsoft may not be that good for the other 310+ million Americans. And what may be "good for Microsoft's America" may not be that good for the other 95% of the world population. 

In my opinion this is NOT a technical problem, it is an ethical problem. There are just too many of us who check their ethics and morals at the entrance of the office building before they begin their daily jobs.

No, it's not government agencies or organizations or companies that "do the wrong thing"; all these entities are run by people that collectively make questionable decisions.

As usual I welcome suggestions and comments right here in the blog.

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