Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft On List of Most Ethical Companies
walterbyrd writes "Microsoft is among the world's most ethical companies, according to a list put together by the Ethisphere Institute in New York. Overall, 110 companies made the prestigious list, including Microsoft and 35 other newcomers. The complete list was reported by Forbes."
Holy shit... Accenture, eBay, NYSE, Symantec...
Even among large companies, you can find much, much better ones.
The list lacks Google too -- they have evil sides too, but they are at least trying, unlike most.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
There's a difference.
Nearly 3,000 companies were nominated--or nominated themselves--to be considered this year. The record-high number of nominations and applications demonstrates companies' desire to be acknowledged for high ethical standards.
See... companies nominate themselves... I wonder how much money under the table to the think tanks or people paid off it takes to be listed as most ethical? Is it as many as it takes to get OOXML a rubber stamp as an "open" standard?
Ethisphere reviewed nominations from companies in more than 100 countries and 36 industries. Ethisphere's proprietary rating system, which it calls the Ethics Quotient, is based on a series of multiple-choice questions in a survey that is designed to capture a company's performance in an objective and standardized way.
Ah, it's proprietary. That means first and foremost "We won't tell the specifics of how this was determined" That's what proprietary means, right? The exact details are secret, and therefore magically valid?
The winnowing process includes reviewing codes of ethics and litigation and regulatory infraction histories
Because unethical companies always have successful litigation/regulatory infractions against them, and ethical ones don't? There's no such thing as a regulatory agency being in bed with a corp. Judges are never corrupt. What's unethical is never legal and always breaks regulations, and what's ethical is always legal and never breaks regulations?
evaluating investment in innovation and sustainable business practices
Because innovative companies are automatically ethical and companies with "unsustainable" business practices are automatically unethical?
Any company that has had significant legal trouble over the past five years is dropped.
Because getting billion dollar fines in 2008 and being found liable for patent infringement is not significant legal troubles?
Companies that focus on alcohol, tobacco or firearms also get the boot.
Because it's arbitrarily declared unethical for Alcohol, Tobacco, or Firearms, to exist, or what? That alone totally undermines Ethisphere credibility.
Firearms are essential for the preservation of human life.
So is Alcohol.. first of all Alcohol is one of the first antiseptics humans made, has important medical scientific uses; has spurred many innovations. The product is not a bad one, and also, many "green fuel" producers are Alcohol companies (also referred to as Ethanol)
I was a subscriber for a while, until they sent me a renewal notice written to look like a collections notice. A prior orkplace used to routinely be named on a "Best Places to Work" list (not by Forbes, though) to the collective dismay of all who worked there. These sorts of lists don't mean what you think they mean, unless you think they don't mean anything.
To be fair, Forbes did not compile the list. I think the so-called "think tank" is more to blame.
As I posted on the site: Ethisphere Institute is one of those so-called "think-tanks" that makes up reports to "prove" anything it's sponsors want "proven." Microsoft makes sizable donation to many such "think-tanks" and all of those "think-tanks" are Microsoft friendly - what a surprise. Just one of the many super ethical things that MS does for us.
Symantec? REALLY? At least microsoft actually improves their product from version to version; Symantec looks for ways to make it break worse, and then spends 80% of their budget on marketing to convince every mom and pop that they need Norton, despite the fact that it is consistently one of the WORST pieces of software to install on a computer.
How can that be "unethical" if it's what all vendors do?
Because popularity and ethics are orthogonal concepts?
IOW, that says more about "all vendors" than it does about the ethics of the action.
It's a low appraisal of EVERYONE ELSE.
Really though, Microsoft generally doesn't lock down their OS from tinkering (aside from lack of source), and unless windows mobile 7 has changed things you have file manager access and everything in their mobile platform. Android inexplicably doesn't come with a file manager last I checked. Absurd!
And unlike Sony, they aren't sending cease and desist letters to kinect hackers.
It is thanks to Microsoft (And IBM) we have the PC after all.
And they could easily be far worse patent trolls than they currently are.
Looks like a duck. Quacks like a duck. Has feathers like a duck. Shits like a duck. It's a duck. No names, just quacks.
In other words, you have nothing -- you just saw something somewhere you thought was a duck, but it's really just some battery-powered duck decoy that happened to float by.
If there were a real duck, you can be sure the guy over there behind the bush with the rifle would already have got it.
Nobody said the OSS people are "nice". For example, Torvalds is known to be a git sometimes, and RMS is a known crazy fanatic. etc. etc. etc.
None of them are trying to get on any "most ethical person list", nor claiming to be saviors of the world by dumping billions onto "charitable causes".
And I, for one, avoids reiserfs like the plague, as I have for years ever since ext3 came out (which was years before Hans was even a murder suspect).
Don't quote me on this.