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Can we upgrade Microsoft's social rating from CCC to CCC+?

For the benefit of those, such as myself, who did not get the reference, CCC is a low bond credit rating.

Also, a couple of things to keep in mind here about the history of MS corporate strategy. First, MS has a record of adopting (e. g. Kerberos) or imposing (e.g. OpenXML) open standards for the purpose of corrupting or abusing those standards. A record of unscrupulous behavior breeds distrust and it would be reasonable to suspect that MS could have something similar on mind for the Android platform. Good summary of the Kerberos episode here:

In November 1998 an internal memo leaked out of Microsoft which clearly stated that Open Source software not only performs and scales much better than Microsoft Products (it discussed especially the quality and availability of Linux), but also proposed that Microsoft attack these superior products by "de-commoditizing protocols". In other words, when faced with a superior competitor, Microsoft's preferred approach is to corrupt global standards and to introduce proprietary protocols that bind the user to the Microsoft environment.

Don't believe me; see for yourself - read the Halloween documents, made available by Eric S. Raymond. Incidentally, Microsoft has acknowledged the authenticity of these documents and actually responded to them. It's interesting reading. Very.

A good example of this policy in action (apart from the HTML and Java deviations described above) is Microsoft's attempt to appropriate the Kerberos protocol. Kerberos is an authentication protocol developed by MIT, distributed as Open Source software. Microsoft added an "innovative improvement" to Kerberos, by misusing a reserved field to specify whether or not an NT machine was allowed to authenticate another Kerberos system, rendering this corrupted version of Kerberos incompatible with Open Source versions in the process. (The misuse of a reserved field, or any field for that matter, is of course a gross violation of protocol standards.) Then Microsoft went on to state that they had "created" an "improved version of Kerberos", called the result their own intellectual property, and threatened to sue anyone who would dare to put it in their software, including Kerberos' inventor MIT. Only the global uproar that followed caused Microsoft to reconsider this nonsense.

Secondly, and more innocuously, someone at MS might have wised up and realized that profits from their Android patent licensing would be better than losses from another round of failed MS OS phone investment.

Ah, I remember when Microsoft did the same thing with the OpenGL ARB and more or less poisoned it, leaving OpenGL for dead once they had completed their mission. Also, W3C, Java and pretty much every other standard group they've sabotaged^H joined usually end up the same way.

So forgive me if I see this as yet another attempt at killing off open standards.

More reading

The 'DOS Ain't Done 'til Lotus Won't Run' Myth

As for the rest of your bullshit, it looks like you lifted most of it from other anti-MS zealot resources, such as this one.

It's a simple fact: you're a Linux Zealot. You have ZERO CREDIBILITY on such issues. Now, fuck off, Martian.

Perhaps they would have done this earlier if Antitrust law did not prevent it?

Maybe. Maybe not.

... engadget article ...

That article doesn't say anything except that Apple have been caught producing sloppy code (mostly for Safari) after resting on their laurels (the reputation of their BSD-derived Darwin OS) for too long. If Dr. Miller currently finds it harder to find *new* vulnerabilities in Windows than in OS X, that doesn't mean Windows is now inherently more secure: it still has many other vulnerabilities that take too long to get fixed, and sometimes never do. Which is why the vast majority of all worms, viruses, etc. are still for Windows (and not just because of their market share).

Furthermore, all versions of M$ Windows have a number of fundamental design flaws. Here's a nice list: A brief overview of Windows' most serious design flaws Although this document appears to be four years old, I kind of doubt that many of these issues have been addressed in the mean time.

These days I no longer have much to do with Windows these days (thankfully), but there are a few other issues that I can think of. For example, with Unix systems user memory is separate from the rest of the OS and by default users have no permission to write to the file system except in the home directories and in /tmp. With Windows, on the other hand, normal users can easily get the entire OS infected. The more recent draconian measures (as of Vista) that M$ has taken to prevent unauthorized software from being executed seem mostly to be there to prevent software piracy, as opposed to protecting users from malware.

Or, how about the issue of what AV software does to your computer? The two Windows machines that I am currently responsible for to a very limited extent are located behind a firewall and have almost no access to the Internet. This is so that we did not have to install any anti-virus software on them, which would otherwise slow their performance down intolerably. No doubt people these days think such a ridiculous performance hit is normal, but when I was managing Windows boxes back in the 90s it wasn't nearly so bad. To me, the mere fact that all mainstream AV solutions nowadays affect Windows performance so severely only helps to reinforces the notion that fundamental flaws affect all versions of Windows.

The borgified Bill Gates was on the cover of BoardWatch magazine in 1996. It's not a Slashdot original.

Sad but true.

For anyone who wants more details regarding the true story of the Evilness of Gates & MS see;

http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_1.html

That's exactly how web standards got to be the mess they are. Browser manufacturers wrote browsers to be compatible with each other and to support new features, instead of following the standards. And thus the standard fell behind and became increasingly useless.

What an outrageous defence! It was Microsoft who deliberately broke the web with IE and since they dominated the browser after they eliminated Netscape, others had no choice but code their websites to work with IE. See "Standards as a means of sabotage"

Microsoft did what they had to do to break compatibility. They must have been laughing themselves silly when they realised that other users of ODF had left the door open for them to both break compatibility AND claim compliance.

Don't kid yourself, they may have been very happy to claim that they are compliant, but compliance was not the aim. Breaking compatibility was the primary purpose.

Why was this modded Flamebait? It is actually insightful, given Microsoft's history. That moderators rarely award points to ACs is somewhat understandable, but to censor an AC when it is already invisible is puzzling to me. Must have been an unintentional error is the only thing I can imagine.

I'd rather say that Standards were developing at the time - and there were certainly guidelines emanating from CERN and W3C. It really was the age of discovery with Netscape (and Sun and others including Microsoft) slowly adding functions to "the browser". The browser and server were designed to be stateless and uniform, but development and imagination were happening too slowly. I'll credit Microsoft with lighting a fire under everyone's butt. They showed the world how bad it could get if everyone sat back and waited for development to just happen. They threw a lot of resources at the Internet, but I believe the primary goal was to lock down ownership, not necessarily to improve the way things worked. The Internet as invented by Microsoft self destructed under the weight of 150,000 Windows specific viruses, irresponsible exploit vectors, the resulting spam and a host of other things that has made the Internet a dangerous place to be.

The gloves came off when Microsoft transformed their browser to be part of a client-server relationship. They provided the browser (IE), the authoring tools (Front Page) and the server technology (Server Extensions) from which to launch their proprietary communication system masquerading as an ordinary browser. Eventually, they tied all of that to their OS to make an inseparable monolithic system which nobody could really share in. They did release an SDK to build server extensions, but they certainly didn't interoperate with anything else nor reveal what was going on inside. Interoperability was not in Microsoft's interest and it left anyone not using IE on Windows trying to reverse engineer the flaming bag of shit that was handed them.

It seemed, to everyone else, that this ecosystem was designed to make competing systems look illiterate. It succeeded to such an extent that most of the corporate world believed that Microsoft was the only source for software. They had already trounced the document creation world and intended to do the same with the Internet. The Internet meant delivering commerce and private data (Passport), locking down media (Palladium), sourcing the news (MS-NBC) along with other related initiatives. The roadmap was being followed by those who understood that Microsoft wanted control of all these items in order to erect a toll booth for everyone - described in the most draconian, unflattering terms. I think the pundits were right. Microsoft wanted to gather your news, entertainment, banking and anything else they could grab, mark it up and sell it back to you. In turn, they could resell whatever they gathered back to businesses trying to reach you in the most invasive way possible.

They almost got away with it. Using a money=survival hammer on the rest of the industry didn't work so well with a shrinking group of radical, old school hackers. They gave birth to the OSS as we know it and are now thundering at the walls of Jericho.

Microsoft spent considerable effort over the years corrupting interoperability standards to favor themselves. I've got a list of things Microsoft "killed", or damaged so badly that nobody else could use it but I stumbled upon this page which really sums it up for me. It's got most of my list plus a few new ones (and I haven't even read all the chapters yet). It doesn't include things like Intel's NSP effort, which would have dramatically accelerated video on desktops (interesting to me since I'm in the Television Broadcast business). Microsoft objected to NSP, called every video hardware vendor and told them not to support it and threatened to cut anyone off who did. Details of that and a hundred similar unfriendly things are in the court transcripts somewhere.

I also recall all the "Made for Windows" stickers on everything which really meant "Incompatible with Anything Else". Some of the agreement terms included not supporting anything Microsoft deemed a competitor to t

But DEC then sued MS:
http://www.businessreviewonline.com/blog/archives/2005/10/index.html

"Microsoft hired Cutler, who immediately started work on what would become Windows NT. DEC sued because it believed Cutler had put Mica or even VMS code in NT, and Microsoft eventually paid up $150m. As part of the settlement Microsoft agreed that Windows NT and its BackOffice applications would offer support for DEC's Alpha processor, which is why DEC Alpha was the only RISC chip that supported both Digital's version of Unix and Windows NT - quite a coup for DEC."

And
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_1.html

"As a result, many design principles found in the VMS kernel ended up in Windows NT. (The number and splitting of priority levels in the scheduler, the use of demand-paged virtual memory and the layered driver model are only a few examples of many, many similarities.) The first version of VMS was released in 1977. Without trivializing the efforts of Cutler and his team (they did a lot of work on the project) one has to wonder what Microsoft really means with "New Technology". To illustrate, in a little known out-of-court settlement Microsoft paid DEC $150 million in compensation for using portions of old Digital OS code in Windows NT."

Well, here is one guys fairly well constructed opinion (not mine): http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS. html

for more info: http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_ intro.html

http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS. html

...Intel's future would be as shortlived as IBMs was, as Atari's was, as GM's was... I said Intel would have its down days, just as I say today that someone will beat Microsoft fair and square some day, too.

But how long before it takes before someone finally beats the monopoly? Years and decades in your examples. Humans only live so long, and the whole point of a justice system is to right wrongs in this lifetime and, in legal parlance, to "make whole" or undo the damage done by the perpetrator. Anticompetitive behavior that stunts both innovation and consumer choice and artificially maintains market share or prices for the perpetrator comes with significant costs. How many true innovators and innovations were anti-competitively quashed by MS, for example? Your analysis of the situation is naively rose-tinted.

Like what? Lowering prices below market value? That is _good_ for consumers because NO business can sell for a loss forever -- the minute that they raise their prices after they've wiped the competition clean, new competition will turn up the beat them down again.

Someone already elaborated on the barriers-to-entry problem you're conveniently ignoring.

Again, this is all acceptable if the contract stipulates these situations -- most suppliers are happy to sign agreements if they know what the customers want.

Or when they're being played off against their competitors by a monopoly that supplies the only parts for the market...

I'm glad to see these big companies fall because they're all colluding with the various governments to maintain their power through what I consider negative rights -- copyright, patents and ridiculous mandates requiring their products.

I'm not against big companies so much, but both our political and IP systems are certainly screwed.

FTFS:

"The key was vendor acknowledged critical vulnerabilities. Thus, if Microsoft (or the Mozilla Foundation) didn't agree it was critical, then it didn't get counted."

Mozilla has Bugzilla to keep track of it's issues, MS is notorious for claiming bugs are in fact features.

Also, IMHO any security issue is 'critical'. Someone once said that MS's 'critical vulnerabilities' are security flaws that should never have made it past design stage.

Maybe you should read up on the history of MS a bit, as well as the Findings of Fact from their anti-trust trial. I personally don't hate MS and as an IT professional I use their products when the situation merits it, but not blindly. It's worth understanding the source of the antipathy toward MS b/c it's not without reason or justification.

Windows, which is really a great OS,

Actually, Windows is not a really great OS. Scroll down to the third section titled Design flaws common to all Windows versions and start reading.

Isn't it funny how short people's attention spans really are.

It's not like Microsoft hasn't been doing this for a long time. Using these tactics, that is.

No, no, they've been doing this sort of thing for as long as they have been in existence. And anyone who maintains a position against Microsoft is just a troll. Right?

Wrong. Just because you have an anti-Microsoft viewpoint doesn't make you a troll. It just means that you can remember what happened last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that, ad infinitum.

So here's a message to my fellow /.ers: Don't be so f*cking fickle. Analyze the broad view for, well, the past decade, if you have the capacity to do so, and make up your mind! And when doing so take the viewpoint of a corporation, who operates on fiscal-quarters and calendar years--not day to day pettiness of small minded existence. As a proof, I too reference that it was just yesterday that this was posted.

Isn't it funny how short people's attention spans really are.

It's not like Microsoft hasn't been doing this for a long time. Using these tactics, that is.

No, no, they've been doing this sort of thing for as long as they have been in existence. And anyone who maintains a position against Microsoft is just a troll. Right?

Wrong. Just because you have an anti-Microsoft viewpoint doesn't make you a troll. It just means that you can remember what happened last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that, ad infinitum.

So here's a message to my fellow /.ers: Don't be so f*cking fickle. Analyze the broad view for, well, the past decade, if you have the capacity to do so, and make up your mind! And when doing so take the viewpoint of a corporation, who operates on fiscal-quarters and calendar years--not day to day pettiness of small minded existence. As a proof, I too reference that it was just yesterday that this was posted.

Welcome brother!

Come take a bite of the forbidden fruit. Once you taste it, you'll never eat anything else again!

Well... perhaps penguins from time to time ;-)

This isn't about loving Windows, it's about Microsoft.

Why would anybody love such a two-faced company?

http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS. html

it [Windows] was a pioneering effort. No one was even close to the ease of use that Windows offered. Sure, Mac OS was a lot prettier but then it cost the moon and the stars along with both your arms and legs.

Somebody mod the article -1 Flamebait, please. For those who wonder why, read.