I think that is what they were intimating in that last sentence. That the Notepad++ devs are implicitly supporting MS (and so Bing) by writing a Windows application.
Notepad++ has been a Windows application long before Bing was even a twinkle in its creator's eye.
Cancelling your technical platform over decisions that its vendor made decades after you originally picked it (and discarding N*17 man-years of your own hard work) smells of a logical fallacy, though I can't pinpoint which one.
You can't pinpoint which one because it's not a logical fallacy. Which makes it extra funny you're reaching for one, just because you find what I have to say uncomfortable. I'm afraid you'd have to satisfy yourself with emotional downvoting and no explanation why you feel this way.
Notepad++ was a Windows app before Bing existed, and Bing was a search engine in Notepad++ before they filtered Tank Man.
The question is are you doing symbolic knee-jerk gestures, but stopping right before it matters, or are you that clueless not to realize everything you do is Microsoft related, before you try and pretend you're going against Microsoft.
You see, everyone wears FUCK THE SYSTEM t-shirt, but then they play along with the system. Communicating one thing and doing another is quite pathetic IMHO, and counter-productive. It shows the cognitive dissonance behind our "pop-morals" if I can call them so, the things we get "outraged" on social media, and the lives we actually have.
I think an intelligent, thinking individual works on those discrepancies in their mind until they arrive at a cohesive (albeit not as simple) worldview where their actions and words match.
But for the rest, there's always the FUCK THE SYSTEM t-shirts, and the SAVE THE NATURE stickers for your gas SUV bumper.
That's what Notepad++ is. Pretending to go against Microsoft by deleting Microsoft's search engine on Microsoft's GIT hosting of their app written for a Microsoft OS.
My worldview is that we have two search engines worth a damn in this world, Google and Bing, and everything else uses their results more or less (yes, including Duck Duck Go). And Google has done a lot more shit than Microsoft to merit a ban if any one should be banned. Yet no one is comfortable banning Google because they dominate. Bing is easier to ban, because they don't matter much. so everyone is directing their cheap outrage in their direction.
Although the Tank Man decision is likely the actions of one person in a tens of thousands of people department, and rejecting their work wholesale due to one transgression like this is ridiculous. Also everyone knows about Tank Man. Even the dogs in China do. So what is this, if not the armchair symbolic issue of the day, where you get to feel you're making a difference by hopping on the right symbolic bandwagon? It's the online version of a bumper sticker.
