They are not immune. As someone who has been supportive of Microsoft getting their act together, and who recently spoke at a Microsoft-sponsored conference, this stuff makes me hesitant to give any Microsoft-owned properties money and discourages me from trying new Microsoft products.

There will be newer people after you flocking to the new Microsoft. Given how scummy and bad they have been in the past and how many people have been cheerleading them here, do you really think it works that way?

When people were warning against Microsoft on this forum they were just set aside as cynical, grumpy Unix-beards. If that happens even here, what do you think will happen elsewhere?

I think it's changing. I was one of the young people who did not believe the neckbeards (who are evangelists in their own right) since I wasn't around when the EEE strategy happened. I was happy with Windows because for me it was a better user experience, but today I run Linux and OSX. The world is more connected now than it was. These sentiments can spread faster now.

Giving them constructive criticism and using their open source stuff, but strictly not giving them money might be an acceptable way with dealing them.

For example, I wanted to buy Win10 recently, and also wanted to sign up for Teams. Both experiences were so unimaginably ridiculously terrible, that I ended up cancelling the Teams subscriptions the same day and not buying Win10.

On the other hand .NET (Core), PowerShell, TypeScript and VS Code are all great things.

I mean, isn't that because they haven't been screwing people over (that we know of) recently?

If more stories like this one come out I'm sure the goodwill turns fast.

Well 1mn usd of PR damage is not a big problem when you have 100bn usd plus annual revenue. But for an individual employee it’s a bad reputation hit.

Lots of open source services springing up...that only run on CosmosDB.