Microsoft loves to play saviour. Every glossy keynote, every AI sermon, every smug sustainability pledge reeks of a company desperate to be seen as the conscience of technology. But scratch the surface and you find the same rot that drives every corporate machine – monopoly power, surveillance, exploitation, and hypocrisy so thick it clogs the filters.

And right at the core of that hypocrisy sits a familiar friend – Cummins Inc. The diesel giant with a billion-dollar emissions fraud to its name, now hardwired into Microsoft’s shiny cloud empire. Cummins powers Microsoft’s datacentres with backup generators, while Microsoft returns the favour by dressing Cummins in green PR drag – “AI efficiency”, “sustainable innovation”, “fuel-cell collaboration”. In 2017 they even cut the ribbon together at the Seattle “Advanced Energy Lab”, where they promised a future powered by natural gas. Translation: a PR bubble running on fumes.

When Cummins got caught choking the planet with defeat devices, Microsoft didn’t blink. Because the truth is, they’re cut from the same cloth – the tech behemoth and the diesel polluter, both addicted to control and allergic to accountability.

Monopoly Mindset: The Addiction to Domination

Microsoft’s empire was never built on genius alone. It was built on bullying. In the 1990s, they crushed competition like a habit. The US antitrust case laid it bare – hidden APIs, strong-armed PC makers, and a culture that thought rules were for smaller people. Bill Gates, the boy wonder turned boardroom tyrant, mumbled through depositions while Microsoft staff doctored evidence. The verdict: guilty.

Europe followed with €899 million in fines for the same old trick – bundling Windows, burying rivals. Then in 2024, déjà vu: regulators dragged them back for forcing Teams down Office users’ throats. Decades later and they’re still using monopoly muscle to suffocate competition, just now they call it “ecosystem integration”.

Privacy Predators: The Company That Watches Everything

Windows doesn’t run on code. It runs on your data. Every keystroke, every file, every idle moment vacuumed into Microsoft’s servers. The so-called “telemetry” baked into Windows 10 and 11 turned every machine into a confessional booth with a direct line to Redmond. Opt-outs buried, consent twisted, privacy treated as a nuisance.

They were first through the NSA’s front door in the PRISM leaks – letting spooks sift Outlook inboxes and Skype calls like digital bin men. Abroad, Bing played censor for Beijing, blocking “Tank Man” images across the globe and blaming it on “human error”. Sure. And now the Recall feature – an AI that screenshots your screen every few seconds – brings the surveillance straight to your desktop.

This isn’t innovation. It’s voyeurism with a marketing department.

Velvet Sweatshop: The People Who Build the Prison

Behind the slogans about inclusion sits a factory of burnout. The “Velvet Sweatshop” they called it in the 80s – soft perks, hard hours, and a revolving door of exhaustion. The permatemp scandal exposed how they used long-term “temporary” workers to dodge benefits, eventually coughing up $97 million in settlement cash without a shred of shame.

Decades later, nothing’s changed. Diversity pledges melt into air, H-1B visas get milked for cheap labour, and when staff protested war contracts and ICE deals, management hid behind “policy”. Microsoft loves activism – as long as it’s on a slide, not the street.

Security Swiss Cheese: Breached, Hacked, and Shrugging

For a company flogging security solutions, Microsoft can’t secure a sandwich. SolarWinds in 2020. Russian infiltration in 2024. Chinese breaches in 2023. Source code leaks, ransomware bonanzas, data spills from the very cloud they swear is unbreakable. They’re under federal probe for negligence that let spies rummage through government inboxes.

Even when caught, they default to arrogance: “We take this seriously”. No you don’t. If you did, you’d stop using your customers as crash-test dummies for half-baked patches.

Censorship, Control, and Corporate Cowardice

Microsoft doesn’t debate criticism – it buries it. The “algorithmic” erasure of TCAP content from Bing wasn’t an accident. Hundreds of posts, both blog and Substack, vanished in sync. Still live, still indexed elsewhere – just not in Bing’s shrinking sandbox.

They call it moderation. It looks a lot like protection. Protection for their diesel partner, protection for their ESG narrative, protection for a conscience too fragile to face scrutiny.

This isn’t their first time blacklisting journalists either. Reporters covering human rights abuses and tech ethics have found their work buried or de-ranked by Bing. Patterns don’t lie. Microsoft doesn’t want truth on the front page; it wants obedience in the search bar.

The Hypocritical Partnership: Cummins in the Cloud

Microsoft sells itself as clean tech’s white knight, but its cloud runs on fossil breath. Cummins builds the backup engines that keep Azure alive when the power flickers. That means every AI sermon, every sustainability boast, every green slide deck is built atop a diesel generator – the same company fined $1.6 billion for emissions cheating.

That’s the punchline of this whole circus: the green cloud that stinks of smoke.

Conclusion: The Cult of Progress with Blood on Its Hands

Microsoft is what happens when a company confuses dominance for virtue. It’s the church of modern capitalism – preaching innovation while pickpocketing privacy, exploiting labour, and silencing dissent. Cummins is just its mirror in metal – both worship profit, both poison their environment, both pretend it’s progress.

Together they’ve built something unholy: a network where the diesel polluter powers the digital censor. One chokes the air, the other chokes the truth.

So here’s the reality, stripped of their spin – Microsoft doesn’t build the future. It buries it.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Customer Corner : Microsoft – The Cloud That Chokes on Diesel