Seriously, I can't even count the amount of times I read about a company doing something good/bad/neutral in a day and reading comments about said action that boil down to "they only did it for money". Who fucking cares what their motivations are, a business is an entity designed to make money and they are made up of multiple different people with different morals and convictions. I wish these people would comment on the actual events and not the "corrupt money grubbing motivations" behind said events.
Because, examining the motivations of the decision makers at Microsoft in this case, allows you to better predict what their actions in the future will be. Seriously, I can't count the number of times on HN, both in this instance and in the past, people have missed this basic principle. Sure, it's great that Microsoft did it in this case, regardless of their reason, but how you should perceive the safety of your data with Microsoft going forward, depends entirely on why they did it. If they did it purely for fiscal reasons, or some combination of fiscal, public relations, and moral reasoning, then how will they act when there is no monetary benefit to be gained by safeguarding their customers' data?
