Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Which Tech Company Do You Respect Most?
dryriver writes: On Slashdot, we often discuss the missteps and non consumer-friendly behavior of various tech companies. This company forced people into a subscription payment model. That tech company doesn't respect people's privacy. Yet another tech company failed to fix a dangerous exploit quickly, protect people's cloud data properly, or innovate and improve where innovation and improvement was badly needed.
Here's a question to the contrary: Of all the tech companies you know well and follow -- small, medium, or large -- which are the ones that you respect the most, and why? Which are the companies that still -- or newly -- create great tech in a landscape dotted with profiteers? Also, what is your personal criteria for judging whether a tech company is "good," "neutral," or "bad?"
Here's a question to the contrary: Of all the tech companies you know well and follow -- small, medium, or large -- which are the ones that you respect the most, and why? Which are the companies that still -- or newly -- create great tech in a landscape dotted with profiteers? Also, what is your personal criteria for judging whether a tech company is "good," "neutral," or "bad?"
trump university.
Whoever it was that decided to shutdown their secure email service instead of hand over info to the feds.
The only truly ethical tech company I can even really think of.
Apple, in 2010. Year of Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
It's been downhill ever since:
No Mac mini update since 2012, downgraded in 2014.
No real update for the MacBook Air since 2015.
No more iPod shuffle.
Unreliable keyboards with almost no travel in $1000+ computers.
Either no RAM slots, or insanely hard to access RAM slots except in their $1800+ iMacs, iMac Pro not included.
Ask Slashdot: What Tech Company Do You Respect Most?
*Which* Tech Company Do You Respect Most?
Respect? duh! None! why should we?
;)
Just my 2 cents
The only source for news.
... since they are all in bed with the entertainment industry and are hell bent on a war against computing and people owning and controlling their own software.
The coming war on General computing and software freedom
Qwest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Yeah, the Mr. Robot promotion was a huge mistake, and they've finally admitted that and pledged to do better.
But I think that mistake only garnered so much attention because Mozilla has been so transparent and aggressive in protecting privacy and advancing the state of browser technology. If somebody like Goog or MSFT pulled that crap, nobody would blink an eye.
Seems like real innovation.
GNU
Do No Evil.
It's all been down hill since then.
They are the only ones that are going to get us off this rock stuck in a gravity well.
I used to respect Google but becoming a public company turned them evil just like every company that goes public. Now DuckDuckGo has come along and they are great because they respect your privacy and don't collect data on people. They are small with a mere 40-some employees which is enough to keep the site going and few enough for them to pay without exploiting users. If that wasn't enough, all their stuff is open source and on github.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I think Mozilla is doing wonderful things and a single mistake doesn't change that.
DuckDuckGo is the other one...
Enercon ...
Beyerdynamic
Wiha
Wera
Ok, the last two are just Toolmakers, but I still count them in.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
They're probably the most successful open source company, and their tech is pretty good too.
While perhaps more of a car manufacturer than tech company, I'd say that they still qualify at least partially as the latter.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Tried hard, always worrried about next year, not next quarter, and got punished for it.
davecb@spamcop.net
I despise Apple. I consider them fashion that uses tech, rather than tech
Intel is tech, and they have accomplished great things. Of course, they are also stuck with a really bad problem at the moment
Atmel and Microchip make useful, but un-glamorous, embedded processors. Their merger has caused us(embedded system programmers) a bit of pain, but on balance, they deserve respect
Fairchild, NXP, Panasonic, AVX, Kemet, Bourns, Vishay and others make the essential tiny bits.. resistors, capacitors, small logic that the rest of the tech world couldn't live without
At one time, Sony was amazing, then they shifted their focus from tech to fashion
LG and Samsung deserve a lot of respect
Possibly my favorite is Texas Instruments
I've never heard anything bad, only good.
Pretty sure that the vast majority of C-level execs making 300x the salary of their employees are boomers, not millenials
I have been a long time paying customer of Fastmail and I am quite happy with them.
Yes, they take my money ($32/year if I renew for 5 years for a legacy plan), but in exchange I get services that I can rely on and prompt support when I need it.
What tech companies respect you most?
A person mght be deserving of respect, if they earn it. Companies aren't people.
Log in or piss off.
HE.net offers nice services to their biz clients, as well as some really nice freebies for enthuasaists. (BGP Toolkit, TunnelBroker, and DNS to name a few)
Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/
Enough said.
NearlyFreeSpeech web hosting: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.n...
They defend net nuetrality. Their pricing structure is clearly laid out with no hidden fees, and emphasis on efficiency, and they do well when you do well. They are run by highly competent individuals.
DuckDuckGo web search: https://duckduckgo.com/html/
Great search that doesn't track you. Fuck yes.
PaleMoon web browser: https://www.palemoon.org/
A modern, FOSS, secure, fast, lean, extensible, and highly configurable browser that took over where FireFox left off. It's run by individuals who have ethics, and stick to them.
Proton Mail web mail: https://protonmail.com/
FOSS end-to-end encrypted e-mail. The only issue I see here is that it is free, so you're likely not the customer... There is another end-to-end encrypted web-mail solution that is $5/mo. or so but I've forgotten the name. Anyone?
RedHat is for sure on the list, alongside Canonical. They have done more for Linux and FOSS adoption by corporatizing than countless other projects combined. The profit motive is powerful and it gets products into the hands of willing consumers. RedHat and Canonical are the great heroes of FOSS.
Open Whisper Systems deserves great praise, though it is financed by some large donors and thus isn't really a company.
Ixquick, DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail all also deserve great thanks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If we can include hardware manufacturers, even advanced cool hardware, then I'll throw out a nomination for Ronnie Barrett and his "little" gun company.
After California banned possession of 50cal rifles, he stopped sales and service to all law enforcement agencies in the state. To me, that is pretty darned principled. https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
HAHAHAHAHAA!
HAHAHAH!
Oh boy :(
My, how things have changed. Honestly I think I like Microsoft more than Google now.
Seems like they're doing pretty well these days.
Are you trying to say "hardware", that only hardware is technology? Because Google / Alphabet creates a lot of new technology - new speech to text technology, self-driving car tech, etc mostly created in software.
> My standard is how they get their revenues. Making tech - like chips (Intel) makes them a tech company. Using tech to say get revenues from say advertising (Google, Yahoo! & facebook) makes them not tech.
Advertising is a *payment method*. You can pay for YouTube by watching ads or by Visa. What generates the revenue is the cool stuff Google provides such as YouTube videos and Google maps. Slashdot and Google maps aren't in the same business, just because they both offer the same payment method. Ads are just the method of payment for the maps and videos, or articles and discussion.
At the time, a long time ago, Motorola was also alive and kicking, and promising. IBM, leader at the time and worried about these new "personal computers", promoted Microsoft software and Intel CPUs along with it. We were numerous to prefer the Motorola architecture and coding. History needs to be seen from both sides of the time period.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I'm not sure Microsoft gets respect for that. They acted entirely in their own self interest. they wanted to sell an OS and make the hardware a commodity so that they could be the suppliers of the only non-interchangeable component. They aggressively locked out competitors in this space (e.g. intentionally breaking MS Windows on DR-DOS). It just happened that there was a beneficial side effect to their anti-competitive behaviour.
Modern Microsoft has a few more things that might deserve respect. They've been much better at engaging with open source projects, for example contributing to LLVM and Clang, open sourcing their .NET runtime (MIT license + patent grant), contributing Linux and FreeBSD patches for Hyper-V, and so on.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's how I like companies - extremely good quality at a fair price, no bullshit spending half of their revenue on marketing, locally manufactured, and they ship internationally.
Unfortunately, these companies are getting rarer and rarer. Quality has a hard time surviving among the sharks.
Lavabit was a mixed bag, they had their pros and cons.
Pros:
* Provided free email service
* Simple
* Most of the features you expect from an email service
* Spam and virus filters were customizable and much easier than most other services.
* They shut down their servers instead of giving up Edward Snowden.
Cons:
* Buggy, bugs were never fixed, bug reports were never acknowledged
* Poor communication skills from the developers, both free and paid accounts
* Actively lied when they shut the service down. For about 2 days they insisted that it was just an upgrade, would be back up soon, and that our emails were not being lost. If they couldn't tell the truth for legal reasons they should have said nothing instead, there was no excuse for the lies.
* For about 2 days after the shutdown they continued to accept emails sent to users, instead of just rejecting them so the senders would know that the emails had not been delivered.
Lavabit is back up but I don't use them anymore because of their behavior the first time. They are just not trustworthy.
Exactly. Ibm in the 50-70 was a power House. But from 80-90, they were a monopoly that got in the way, and now, they are nothing as told by no real innovations or profits.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not only are they boomers, but the ethics of those boomers were horrible.
Bill gates? Stole most tech.
Jobs? Same.
Ellison? Not as criminal as gates or jobs, but was considered unethical in most business dealings.
The list goes on.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.