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Why Does Everyone Hate Microsoft?
MrSplog asks: "I'm doing a short project on Microsoft and its impact on society. A considerable part of this project has been looking into people's perceptions of Microsoft and the heavily negative bias of that perception. Since Slashdot is one of the world's forefront leaders on Microsoft hatred, I wanted to know: just why do you hate Microsoft? Please be as descriptive and as thorough as you like. Counter arguments and positive comments are also appreciated."
Microsoft's goal is to own and control everything on my computer, in the server room, eventually perhaps in my lounge room and anywhere else they can imagine. And they try to keep it that way by deliberately avoiding existing open standards and interoperability with existing applications. They adopt new standards with reluctance, and even then they break them.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Perfect example... I had a friend at a little company called Bungie. Bungie was developing this really cool little application called Halo that they were planning on releasing for MacOS, Linux and Windows. Microsoft came along, made them an offer they could not refuse and they bought the company so Halo could be a "halo" game for the Xbox platform. This of course meant that all development of Halo for the Macintosh and Linux were cancelled and Windows development was significantly delayed. It was almost a couple of years before I was asked to help with the development of the Macintosh port of Halo. So, I and many, many other users of the Macintosh and Linux (and Windows for that matter) were negatively impacted by this very common business practice of Microsoft.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Why do people hate Microsoft? In a word: Greed. Microsoft is consumed by a rampant, unrepentant, no-holds-barred corporate ravenousness for consumer dollars. At least this is how it looks to individual consumers, small businesses, and even most other large enterprises.
Some examples:
- Microsoft was among the first major, mainstream software publishers to charge paying customers for technical support on legally-owned Microsoft products.
- Microsoft was one of the first major, mainstream software companies to increase upgrade fees from what was a standard 20% of the original software price to what is now 50%, if you are allowed to upgrade at all.
- Microsoft was the first major, mainstream software company to deny upgrades to customers who don't pre-pay the 50% upgrade fee up-front when the original software purchase is made, with no refund if an upgrade isn't released within two years.
- Microsoft bemoans the cost of software piracy, but each time Microsoft has implemented technology to reduce piracy, it has doubled the price of the better protected software.
- Microsoft adds features to its software that puts competitors out of business, then removes those features and sells them as add-ons or upgraded versions.
- Microsoft talks reduced enterprise TCO benefits on the one hand while making each new release significantly more difficult to deploy, maintain and support.
- Microsoft claims that it's not predatory or monopolistic, while using its overwhelmingly dominant position in the OS market to drive out competitors to its application and development tools marketplaces.
- And yes, Embrace, Extend and Exterminate.
I could give more specifics, but I'm under non-disclosure.--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
Well, I've been using Microsoft products for the last 15 years, and for the last three years I've been working for a company that does support for small- to medium-sized businesses that use Microsoft products. At my office we use a mix of Windows and Linux and at home there are Windows, Mac, and Linux boxes under my desk. I have issues with all of them, to be sure, but here's my Microsoft litany:
Now, a list of what I like about Microsoft products:
I could probably go on all night but I've had a few drinks and need to crash.
Welcome to my world.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Waaaaait a fucking second there.
A guy called JarJarJedi comes to slashdot and bitches about Apple and "Linix", while at the same time glorifying Microsoft's product which he thinks is as good as should be expected, while at the same time he looks at those (Win) computers and sees how often they crash, how virus prone they are and he gets a +4 insightful?
WTF mods?
Asleep at the wheel?
On the offchance that I am wrong, I would then like to say Issa for onessa welcomessa our bizarro-worldssa overlordssa!
And, to stay on the topic, I think tech help "hates" MS because we get stuck fixing their mistakes on our weekends, afterhours and so on. All while the bosses are superhappy about getting the next round of MS licenses for cheap, and delegating the problems to the tech help. This of course leaves nothing for tech help to do but to constantly put out fires while listening to bitchy users.
Sure, script kiddies and CS players of east europe LOOOOVE their microsoft, but they don't have to support 100s of bitchy users whose machines are running slow, because microsoft decided to leave the OS completely vulnerable to spyware.
But I rant. I work for a large Mac shop, so I no longer have the headache of microsoft, and my days are filled with planning for future and improving the network, as opposed to putting out fires. But my hatred for MS is still strong from my previous jobs, and fixing relatives' PCs. Luckily I've got them all switched to Macs, so I no longer spend my holidays cleaning the crap off their machines:) Thank you OS X:)
And oh yeah, lest I forget, Ballmer is a cretin, and I can't get the image of him squirting on the stage, yelling "developers, developers, developers."
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Microsoft told IBM that they had an operating system ready for the 8088, so not to worry. They actually didn't, they bought one from a local business for a few tens of thousands of dollars, then a few years later sued them out of existence for trying to ad multitasking when Microsoft had other plans for MS-DOS at the time.
Plus open source, though I'm a big fan of it, is not the creator of the standard reference of the internet. That would be Unix, and at one time also TOPS-20. Though I guess Berkeley Unix (BSD), back when it was mostly encumbered, could be counted as open source although you couldn't look at their source unless you had a source license from AT&T for the encumbered bits.
So far your batting average is pretty poor, but that doesn't surprise me; someone crediting the IBM-PC commodizing hardware to Microsoft could only be refering to statements made by Windows marketing (I hear so often this claim that I think it comes from MS or their journalist lap-dogs and is not independently arived at.)
Mac OS X does the smart thing. Rather than screw up the OS with legacy support, it provides an emulator for the "classic" Mac OS to run applications inside of. Thus you get the best of both worlds.
To put it another way, Super Wing Commander works fine on my Mac. The DOS WC games either fail miserably or need tweaking to get working. (Obviously, both require a slowdown utility.) IMHO, the Mac ends up having superior backward compatibility.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The reason Paintbrush is the best application they've ever written is because Microsoft didn't write it.
I've got installation media for Windows 2.03 kicking around somewhere which came with my first Microsoft mouse and it's actually ZSoft PC Paintbrush which was bundled with the mouse.
The mention of ZSoft was dropped in Windows 3.0 and apart from support for things like GIF and JPG now, the application has changed very little since Windows 2 (Well if it ain't broke...)
For people who like peace and quiet. A phoneless cord!
I guess you've never heard of DOSEMU, a program that uses the Linux kernel call "vm86" to run 16-bit DOS programs in the vm86 mode of 386-compatible processors ? Most 16-bit DOS applications I've tried on it have worked just fine.
Or you could use DOSBox, which is a complete emulator (meaning it emulates the processor too, unlike DOSEMU). The odd DOS app that didn't work under DOSEMU works fine under DOSBox.
It's the support for Windows applications (via Wine) that is less than perfect under Linux, but it is improving. Then again, it could hardly be getting worse ;).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I am a live dinosaur. I have owned and used every MS OS version since MS-DOS 2.1. I beta tested Windows 1.0.
Ok, granted it is not doubling every time, but this IS Slashdot, and I am allowed poetic license.
How about Microsoft Windows Antivirus: Included free in 3.0/3.1 versions, removed from 3.11. Now sold as Microsoft OneCare. How about a calendar application, which later was integrated with an Email application and became the first version of MS-Outlook in Windows 3.11, removed from Windows 98, and now sold separately? How about backup, which has been in and out in so many different ways that I lost track?
Well, it's a really old and broad non-disclosure.--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
Windows does use emulation for legacy apps. It uses the NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine) for DOS apps and WoWExec (Windows-on-Windows) for 16-bit Windows apps. Their 64-bit OSs have WoW64, which emulates a 32-bit machine.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
My main gripe right now is that IE7 was forced onto many people's computers as an automatic update, and it has broken nearly every single website I have put into production, and now I have to go back and fix rendering/scripting issues that only affect IE7, and the more of these I fix, the more obvious to me how lousy this browser is, but hell what can you do? 25% of the visitors are using it now. It also has one of the most ridiculous interfaces of any browser ever. I was actually looking forward to it, i figured (for some reason) that it would improve upon IE6, but it hasn't.
Just a Few:
1. As a college student I paid under $20 for my copy of WinXP, but would have had to pay ~$45 for MacOS X. Although this doesn't tend to defeat your argument, it sure does lower one of the reasons not to use Windows and makes OS X the one which needs to prove itself.
2. I know how to use Windows. These were skills I built up before ever owning my own PC, mostly when I was living at home using my parents PC, and my Dad used Windows because it was built on DOS, the earliest OS he knew. What you say above is right once you get to know how to use Windows you don't want to anymore, but alas I've already paid for it and have a box which does pretty much everything I call on it to do, so there isn't any reason to need another PC or to switch.
3. I have very rarely been called on to know/learn a piece of software that doesn't run on Windows. I have on the other hand been called on to know/learn Power Point, Word, Excel, InDesign, and many others. This is excluding text editors run on Linux machines for my CS classes, but then they haven't cared which one I use so on WinXP at home I use Notepad++, and in lab on Linux I use nedit.
4. If I want a Linux box I'll build one and will be able to do it on the cheap. So I'm not worried about getting one right now, when I'm college style poor, I'd rather have steak once in a while.
5. My friends/relatives/co-workers/group-members know how to use Windows and thus I don't have to try and explain Linux everytime they want to do something on my computer; this happens quite frequently I might add.
6. The games, I know you tried to blow this off with consoles but thats not a valid argument, because as a cheap/poor college student I can't afford to buy an XBox 360 or a PS3 or a Wii or whatever. And I don't enjoy console gaming as much either so atleast let me have my own preferences in that realm, without just telling me that my preference doesn't matter. I don't own any consoles and don't really plan on buying one for a good while.
As a note I would not consider myself a Windows "fanboi" but I do feel Windows is right for me, right now, and I feel anyone telling me I'm wrong is really in no place to say so. Your choice of OS really boils down to circumstances and that is all there really is to it.