John Gruber has published commentary on "Microsoft’s 50th Birthday Was Interrupted, Twice, by Employees Protesting Against Israel", apparently of his own volition, for free. Let's cherrypick a few lines and perform some very boring, obvious, surface-level commentary of my own.

The place for righteous protests is in public, in the streets — exactly as they are happening across the United States today.

"The place for righteous protests is where they can be safely ignored from the offices of tech workers"

If Microsoft employees really want to make the case that the company should sever all ties to Israel, go ahead, but performance stunts at public celebrations are not the way.

Okay, smart boy, what is the correct way? Politely worded, easily ignorable internal memos?

Have you read what Ibtihal Aboussad, the first event disruptor, wrote in her email? Maybe you didn't, because she goes over that:

"For the past year and a half, our Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim community at Microsoft has been silenced, intimidated, harassed, and doxxed, with impunity from Microsoft. Attempts at speaking up at best fell on deaf ears, and at worst, led to the firing of two employees for simply holding a vigil. There was simply no other way to make our voices heard."

I'm trying to think of any protest action that a) makes the news, and b) doesn't result in you sneering at it, but I'm coming up empty. I know you want to think they're deeply stupid people for "caring about something" and "causing a scene", but they have indeed been thinking this action through.

Why do they even work for Microsoft if they’re not happy to celebrate the company’s own 50th anniversary? Why did Microsoft hire people who seemingly despise the very company they work for?

Yes, we all caught the call for their firing in that sentence. You're not slick.

And come on now. You're a tech commentator. You're very familiar with the cognitive dissonance involved working for large tech companies. Surely you know a few "very smart people" who "just love working together and solving interesting problems" at, say, Lockheed Martin. It's only a problem when it's about Israel?

I don’t know if you’ve heard but there’s a lot of horrible shit going on around the world right now. Should Microsoft sever all ties to Republican-led states that have made women’s reproductive healthcare illegal?

This line makes it clear, IMO, that you aren't aware of the reason people want to protest Microsoft in the first place.

There is tangible and concrete evidence Microsoft provides material support to Israel's oppression of Palestinians through ongoing technological services. Quoting the other dissenter, Vaniya Agrawal:

"Microsoft cloud and AI enable the Israeli military to be more lethal and destructive in Gaza. It is undeniable that Microsoft’s Azure cloud offerings and AI developments form the technological backbone of Israel’s automated apartheid and genocide systems."

I agree with you that it's not possible to run a Microsoft-style large technology business and only serve ideologically clean causes. On one extreme, a conclusion from this could be "maybe large tech businesses are bad". But the other endpoint does not have to be "oh well, we plug our ears and don't care at all who we provide support for and what our technology is used for".

This is why the evidence is important. Microsoft can no longer plug their ears and claim obliviousness. To my knowledge there is not as much concrete evidence that Microsoft technology runs "a red state's shitlist of women crossing state borders to find abortions" or somesuch.

How much Microsoft software does ICE use?

Christ almighty, a tech commentator who doesn't know about Github Drop ICE?

What a shitty thing to do it was to try to spoil this.

An honest celebration of history requires celebrating all the history. So maybe Microsoft shouldn't spoil their own history.