Gods Must be Crazy!

Well, yes, but additionally they allocuted wrongdoing, they agree to do some employee privacy sensitivity education thing and sponsor a nationwide campaign about securing your router or whatever, also to destroy the data in question. What Google did is pretty harmless, they definitely didn’t benefit from it nor will they and along the way and down the line the net result of this is many more routers out there lighting up the right encryption that otherwise wouldn’t have, whereas Microsoft made an explicit deal, the terms of which specified how much it would cost them if they broke the deal, they broke the deal, now they’re being charged as originally agreed. Also one could make an argument that they had hurt their competitors and consumers, whereas Google floated too deeply (and kind of accidentally) into the grey area and pissed off some people (Germans especially).

Note that, in Microsoft’s defense, Europe really needs cash and whenever they get an easy chance like this to milk a company in a populist sort of manner they don’t let it slip away. They are particularly aggressive in this regard with financial companies, hedge funds, where one research analyst doing one not-obviously-wrong and itty bitty little thing that’s legal in most places but not in some part of Europe can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions and pack jail time too.

But yeah, I see the disparity you’re highlighting and also believe that, given Google’s success with Chrome and Mozilla’s with Firefox, and Google’s success with not one but two operating systems, these forced ballot things and the like, the need for them has become quite antiquated, it’s time to let Microsoft off this particular hook, this is silly.

With respect to the gods, they can, by definition, see everything without the need for browsers and may not be familiar with the intricacies of the case. And they/He have a well-documented history of being rather crazy, this is nothing. Also, we’re short one pope now, so that can’t be helping the situation.