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Linkedin was because everyone needed to have a “social” strategy back then and apart from maybe Dynamics, there’s no real synergy (I don’t like that word) between LinkedIn and Microsoft’s other businesses.
The GitHub acquisition was part of their plan to start repairing their fractured relationship with developers - almost a PR tool.
In both cases tight integration with the rest of the organisation makes less sense than Salesforce buying Slack - which is something that could be tied directly into Salesforce’s core business.
I've worked at one of these companies but left over a decade ago. I know how we're looked at when we do client work (part of why I left). Some of my colleagues were less competent, true. But, some will wipe the floor with the client employees we did the work for.
To WITCH employees: If you are an employee at one of these companies, remember you are not the worst. Many of you come from humble backgrounds and are just learning the ropes. The world is cruel. It is a tough place, and you will be discriminated against. This is your fuel. You've already made great strides; keep going. You have to.
An adversarial person can flood people with rethoric of issues, corruption, crime, against all established political powers and institutions, and position themselves as the solution to all those ilks.
They can do that by flooding the public square of free opinions (the internet), with disinformation, fake data, lies of omissions, lack of contextualization, attacking all others personally, ridiculing them, etc.
All they have to do is put doubt in people's mind, keep the focus on others, and appeal to emotions of more and more people slowly.
They can do that because they are free to do it.
Then they can gain the political power from it, and slowly replace institutional power with loyalists working for them.
Once they've managed to get enough loyalist in place through this method, they can remove the right to free speech and take over as a fascist or dictator, or other more authoritarian measures.
Then they can continue the same speech they've always been pushing as propaganda, even denying the removal, bans, jailing, and all that of their opposition, and voila.
This is a pretty straightforward playbook. It's played out many times before.
You can call it a soft-coup:
> populists who seek the centralization of power but do so under the pretense of improving democracy
At least to me, it's very obvious our system is susceptible to this kind of adversarial attack. I don't know the solution, you don't want to prevent this attack but enable another one in doing so, but it's a huge threat vector and I'd hope we recognize it and do something to mitigate it.