It made some sense to me. The author used the G/M thing to introduce an idea: that it's powerful to think at scale. And then seeks a way to make a thinking-at-scale structure (bayes' rule) as accessible to the programmer as an if statement, by putting it in the language.
That was the only bit of the article that did make sense to me :) I get lost trying to read ML-style languages.
What people are referring to with respect to Google is that if higher-level statistical operations are as easy as an if statement, then this may explain why google takes (presumably amorally) such a statistical approach their customers (because it is easy to).
But what did any of that have to do with Microsoft, or even Google's practices?
The entire article was a tutorial on Bayes's rule, with a completely irrelevant introductory paragraph thrown in at the top. Nothing about Google or Microsoft's practices was actually mentioned anywhere.
Yes, the article was about simplifying statistical operations. The comments were inferring that some observed practices may have followed as a consequence. I'd prefer to discus the meat of the article, but it's not unusual to see comments go off on a tangent like this.
In this case, it was a quote of a relevant provocative sentence, where the provocation itself was irrelevant. Really, the title was far more intriguing than the quote, but unfortunately the article didn't quite live up to it.
