Mort-Hog
If moral relativism is wrong, I don't wanna be right.
Posts: 4,192
That issue is one over sets.
The question is whether the set itself is doing the thing, or the members of the set doing the thing.
If it were Microsoft releasing a product, it would the set as a whole doing the thing. The individual Microsoft employees are not releasing their own products individually. It is them, together, as a whole, as the set, as 'Microsoft', releasing the product, so 'Microsoft' is treated as a single unit. Third person singular is appropriate. "Microsoft is releasing the product".
If, however, the members of the set are more significant, like Microsoft planning redundancies for Microsoft employees, then you may still use 'Microsoft' to describe the set, but it is more appropriate to use third person plural.
"Microsoft are considering redundancies".
"Oh, Americans and British speak different dialects, o well!!" isn't really an explanation or an excuse for anything. There is no 'authority' on language, there is no 'dialect police', language change is decided by the people that speak it (this process is decidedly quite complex, and is best described by Memetics). But as we've seen lots of times now, just because lots of people decide something, that doesn't make it a good idea.
Logic, however, exists indepedently of how many people agree with it. Set theory is a well-defined faucet of mathematics, so applying that to language is not difficult.
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. " - Bertrand Russell
The Triumph of Stupidity in Mortals and Others 1931-1935
