Slashdot Mirror
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."
Oh, I don't *hate* Microsoft. In fact, I have friends who work there and have made money off of Microsoft stock. I still use Word (although Pages is coming on strong and if I could get EndNote compatibility, I'd switch entirely) and Excel and root for the company on occasion. Where I object to Microsoft is in their shoddy products. Almost every product I've used of theirs that came out at version 1.0 has royally sucked. Their whole concept of bringing products to market is date/deadline driven rather than quality or product driven, much less consumer driven. Classic cases of abysmal products were Windows v1-3, Win-98 and ME, the Zune, Bob, that first tablets and the ultra portable systems I've previewed (error messages that were too big for the display for instance), and of course their always changing interface standards and poor security issues.
Saying all that, I actually had a pretty good Micron PC running Win 95 that was remarkably stable. Of course upgrading it to Win98 was a unmitigated disaster. Win NT was a very stable OS, that was just cryptic to use and administer. Win2000 was pretty decent, and it almost made me switch my home system from MacOS to Win200, but like most products they have simply used their monopoly status to make the right changes very late in the game if ever. How long did it take them to adopt all characters for file names?
Where I really started getting disgusted with their business was after I saw company after company run out of business due to business practices that bordered on illegal and in some cases blatantly crossed the legal line. I always tended to prefer the MacOS, but was fairly platform agnostic (using Windows, Solaris, Linux, Irix, MacOS) for whichever task needed the appropriate platform, but with the advent of OS X, I've become a strong advocate for the Macintosh platform which brings up another issue entirely.... Microsoft has for decades now used Apple as their R&D lab. It's an obvious and well known joke, but if you are familiar with OS X, just wait until you get to play with Vista. Come on now, there are some very smart folks at Microsoft, so why can't they come up with ideas and products on their own? My take on it is that it is an efficiency issue combined with a management issue with too much oversight at the early and mid stages of the game. For instance, how many programmers are there on the Windows development team? Its in the thousands for sure, perhaps tens of thousands all told. For OS X, the number of full on programmers numbers in the hundreds. Under 300 for sure last time I checked a couple of years ago. The whole Quicktime team numbers around 30-40 whereas the Microsoft Media Player team is well into the hundreds. We could go on and on here, but to answer your question, this scientist at least does not hate Microsoft. I've just watched the company for years, purchased some of their products and have found a product from another company (Apple) that meets my needs and does not get in the way of my work the way Microsoft products tend to do.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
An easier question would be "Why not?"
Tieing the web browser to the operating system and creating Active X controls, and then putting no security on them, ushered in the era of spyware and caused tremendous suffering for users and the tech support people scrambling to try to stamp out the spyware.
I hate Microsoft because Slashdot hates Microsoft. I read Slashdot. Therefore, I hate Microsoft because I read Slashdot.
Before the DOJ case we all used to wonder why they produced such poor quality software at such high prices. In fact, we all felt kinda pissed off and betrayed by this. Then the anti-trust litigation put it all into perspective. No mystery anymore, that is, so long as you have even a basic understanding of microeconomics. Monopolies produce poor quality products at high prices - that's what monopolies do. So yeah, no reason to hate Microsoft anymore, we know what they are. Of course, a number of people are still pissed at Microsoft for their abuse of their monopoly, that's fine. But all those people who are pissed off at the government for handing Microsoft this monopoly they have, well, go be pissed off at the government.
Besides which, they'll be gone in 10 years anyways. That's not a rimshot. Shit, it's not even an original thought. It's just the way things are going.
How we know is more important than what we know.
They've crippled inovation in favour of maintaining a monopoly for YEARS now. And I'm not just talking about having alternative OS and word processors. They have been THE_PRIMARY_OBSTACLE for software (and hardware) being truly useful and allowing choice and the possibility of enhancing our lives and contributing to the human condition.
Plus the windows interface sucks.
Believe it.
One of my biggest complaints is how they FORCE people to upgrade to increasingly fragile, vulnerable versions of Windows. They make it so that software vendors mush move along, thus leaving odler versions behind, and ensuring that new versions do NOT run on older versions of Windows.
They have also really upped the "Big Brother" role, where in some instances, perfectly legitimate installs of XP have been shut down by MS's update servers, claiming that they were bootleg or pirate copies. Then just TRY and get MS to unlock your system...? Have your credit card ready. NO THANKS!
There are still a lot of systems running under 98SE that are working just fine, thank you. I don't need or want to spend $200 for a version of windows that is more likely to "break" my currently running software, and won't run on otherwise perfectly viable/functional hardware. I also do not like the "phone home" and "Big Brother" aspects that are built into XP and the new Vista. My 98SE runs everything I need.
Oh, and don't even get me started on their super-vulnerable browser and e-mail clients.
That's my 3c worth.
Willie...
Here's an example...
When NT was first announced, I thought it was the coolest thing since bottled beer. The protected mode subsystems looked like a way to consolidate the APIs of multiple systems. As smoebody who'd already programmed Unix, PDP-11 (RSX), VAX-VMS, MVS, Univac, CDC, etc in the years prior, I thought NT was going to totally rock. It had the potential to subsume everything around it.
Little by little, the OS/2 compatibility evaporated, X-Windows was declared "brain dead", it went beyond embrace and extend, it became Microsoft's way or the highway.
I still wonder - if MS had supported POSIX / UNIX APIs in a protected mode subsystem, would Linux have really "happened"?
Alan.
Clippy.
A) Because the products aren't that good... They are often buggy and insecure,
B) They have way more money than me.
Either one of those is reason enough for me to hate them.
Randomly distributing Karma whenever possible.
They would be gone... the fact is that Microsoft's marketing & legal practices keep them moving. It gets to the point where it has nothing to do with how good their software is.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
When it comes to commercial products, people hate their ____ providers (fill in the blank with the service). Blizzard makes a decent MMO product that millions of people use, but there's a HUGE group of their players who *hate* them even though they use the product. Same with Sony Online Entertainment and Turbine and so on. The same goes for Sprint, Cingular, Verizon, ATandT, et cetera for mobile telephone service -- especially big hatred among the users there, but the service is generally the same across the board... and it's even more ubiquitous. Microsoft is the big, bad behemoth that gives everyone their Operating System. Billions of people hate Microsoft, yet hapily use the product (myself included), likely for the same reason as the above reasons. The only non-commercial exception to this is Government, even though it's the same concept -- everyone hates their goverment, but without the governing, the world would fall apart and it would be a much, much worse place -- theoretically speaking, of course.
Another useful wikipedia article is Criticism of Microsoft.
Personally, I think most of the slimy stuff is due to business decisions. I know a lot of people that work there, and they are generally hard working, intelligent people that sincerely want to impact people's lives for the better, and see Microsoft's large market share as a way to actually make a difference. If the devs were in charge, or if they had scrupulous and competent businessmen, it would be a much different company. The fish rots from the head.
The recent change in leadership is promising, but I'm definitely in the "wait and see" camp. You know, the "buy a mac while I wait and see" camp. Hey, Disney is turning around. It could happen.
Powered by Web3.5 RC 2
Embrace, extend and extinguish, is only a symptom of the real issue. The real issue is that Microsoft fails to subscribe the culture that most geeks subscribe to which is simply: Technical freedom. We want to be able to do whatever we want with technology, and we dont want anyone getting in our way. Microsoft is constantly getting in the the way of technical freedom as it tries to bully its way into being important instead of innovating its way into importance... Microsoft refuses to be in a support role and wants to be the center of the technical world regardless of technical merit. That getting in the way and self centered attitude is the reason everyone *I* know hates Microsoft.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
MS conducts themselves as a bully.
Nobody likes a bully.
I think that for many people Microsoft is hated simply because it's the biggest target. Personally I don't exactly 'hate' Microsoft. I think their OS could be quite a bit better and that they could do a lot more to help their users out. Why do I think that about Microsoft and not, say, Apple? Well because Microsoft's what everyone uses. Frankly I could care less what Apple does, because I don't use it, no one I know uses it, and the computer I help set up as a part-time job don't use it.
So I look at those computers and I see how often they crash, how virus prone they are and the natural impulse is to blame the OS for not being more crash and virus-proof. And since in every case the OS is Microsoft Windows I've developed a bias from only seeing Window's fail. I've never seen another OS crash, I know they exist, so therefore my OS must be worse. It's the good old fashion 'grass must be greener, 'cause mine looks pretty yellow' problem.
I'm sure that if I were to use Linix or Apple (*dons protective flame suit*) I would encounter just as many problems as Windows. They'd be different problems, but there would be problems none-the-less. Frankly I expect my computer to run perfectly and without error in spite of what I do to it, and I expect the computer to compensate for other users who are no where near as technologically inclined as myself. Is that rational to expect that much? No. Is it human impulse to expect that much? Of course. So who's to blame for my computer not running as I irrationally want it to? It's much easier to pick a large target that other people pick on and blame them for every problem rather than acknowledge that the problem is at least partially my fault for trying to use the program in a way it shouldn't be used.
Another part of the Microsoft bashing, in my opinion, is the bandwagon syndrome. It's become officially 'cool' to bash Microsoft and so many people who have never had a single problem bash them anyways.
In all honesty Microsoft get's a lot more flak than they deserve. Is their product perfect? Certainly not! Is it supposed to be? Of course not! Do we expect it to be? Oh yeah. Who's easier to blame? Yourself, for having unrealistic expectation, or a large easy to bash company for not conforming to those unrealistic expectations?
Am I saying Microsoft makes the best software? No, there's better stuff out there for advanced users (take, for instance, my FireFox browser I'm using). Is Microsoft's products as good as should be expected of such a large program? I think so.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
I have seen what could have been, that was not realized because of the current monopoly.
I liked BeOS, more than Linux, more than Apple. I though OS/2 was better than Windows but was not a fan of IBM at the time. I liked WordPerfect more than Office. In fact for each set of software Microsoft has, the alternative that was destroyed I liked before it died a horrible death due to a monopoly tie in. All because Bill Gates was able to sell DOS to IBM, before he actually bought the program from the developer. But good placement, good timing and there are wonderful things Microsoft has done for computing, but their defense of their market monopoly has destroyed some beautiful what could have beens.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
They became a giant by stealing other people's ideas, establishing a status quo of mediocrity, and squashed innovation.
It is frustrating knowing that better products exist that will never get a chance because of their hegemony.
However, I do really like certain Microsoft products. I think Defender is a great idea, perhaps a few years late in the game. MS Office is a great product. Their development tools are good.
And Microsoft has become considerably less evil in recent years, but they have no regards for standards and make life unduly difficult for a great deal of people. Sometimes it doesn't even serve a financial purpose.
Look at their history with Sun and Java. Microsoft clearly has no respect for other's rights or licenses. And they want the internet to be something proprietary that they control, again even if it costs them money, and they don't gain anything from it. They just want to control things. By pushing for browser-specific tags, and refusing to conform to web standards, every webmaster on the planet is put out to design around both standards and Microsoft.
Does Microsoft make money of IE? No. They give it away for free, while throwing butt-loads of money developing it. So why continue to spend money fucking the entire internet over? Because they are bullies who like to remain the king of every hill they can find, even if it means forcing customers into inferior products.
That's why.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
I hate Microsoft because I've used their products.
That's exactly it. Apart perhaps from their Office Suite (which is still 50% shit when you throw in Publisher and Access and all that other crap), every alternative to a Microsoft product usually blows it out of the water.
There might be a few guys who really hate Microsft, but most of us are just sick of having to use their crap.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
It's easy to find someone who hates anything. Microsoft however has been the prime target of computer hatred simply because there is a lack of options. Their are tons of choices for an OS, but for most consumers, they don't go much further than Windows. Also Microsoft markets itself as Professional software and in this day and age Professional anything is expected to be flawless. I personally don't like Microsoft simply because I am a strong believer and open source, and believe that the free software available is more stable and flexible than the products I have to pay for with Microsoft.
I don't hate them. I may not agree with how they go about everything, but they are there. I do prefer linux, espicaly ubuntu over windows, but I do have to use windows. The thing I hate is companies who create software that schools use that is only windows based.
hello
I don't really _hate_ Microsoft per se, but I find that they don't really have my needs in mind (as a developer and long-time computer user). My gripes are really pretty simple:
.net stuff, and that may be cool and all, but part of my job entails maintaining a large (30,000+ line) code base written in pretty much all straight C that uses a lot of win32 calls, and it really sucks that the best documentation on all of that is Google's translation of the chineese version of Visual C 5.x's help files.
I don't like being crammed into an unnecesarily GUI environment. I like the simplicity of scripting and automation that comes with a real command line environment.
I don't like giving up control of my computer. Microsoft is always pushing one thing after another which all take control away from me, the user, in the name of making things easier or safer or some other nonsense. Things that fall under this category are the following: DRM / Trusted Computing, Hiding of system files, Hiding of file extensions, animated toolbars, the fact that IE takes any web server error (40x, 50x, host not found, connection timed out, etc...) and puts up the same uninformative dumbed down error message up. I really want to know the details, and it hides them.
I don't like their pushing of various fad programming models in their development tools. I remember when I upgraded from Visual C++ 5 to VC6 they had taken the raw win32 calls out of the table of contents, so if you looked things up that way, you'd see the MFC way first, unless you knew the calls already, in which case the index could turn them up. When I upgraded again, they had taken the calls out of the index too, but a full text search of the help turned up some examples... There is NO EXCUSE to EVER hide documentation from users, much less DEVELOPERS. I recognize that they are trying to wean people off of win32 so they can go to a more hardware independent
So, yeah, basicly I have largely negative feelings about Microsoft because they don't do a terribly good job of meeting my needs, which wouldn't be such a big deal, except that as a near-monopoly they try very hard to stamp out competing systems that may actually meet my needs quite well. They aren't stamping them out to keep my dollar, they're just doing it in case any of those competing solutions actually turns out better than Windows and draws mainstream users away. As such, they are definitely pissing on my [figurative] corn flakes.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Microsoft is a convicted illegal monopolist.
Microsoft was let off the legal hook by a fortunate change in administrations - more like a fortunate failure to honor the democratic will of the people.
Microsoft spends billions of dollars around the world lobbying for initiatives that restrict and suppress open standards and free software, guaranteeing expansion of its monopoly worldwide and into emerging and developing markets.
Bill Gates may be attempting to use his money to make a positive impact in this world in order to whitewash his legacy in his old age, but had governments and businesses and people invested in open standards and free software instead of the monopolist's products, we would still have Bill's money in our collective pockets, developing our economies, educating our children, and feeding our families.
The insecurities of an aging robber baron are little consolation for the great human and natural resources he has squandered through ruthless malice, contempt for law, personal aggrandizement, and cronyism.
How'd I do?
> if it wasn't for Microsoft, we would probably still be using IBM PC's.
That's just plain wrong. IBM opened up the architecture of the PC, so that anybody could make compatible products. Some engineers at Texas Instruments, frustrated by the shortcomings of the "nearly compatible" TI-PC, started Compaq. THAT is why we've got so much variety in the computer industry. Microsoft was just willing to sell to anybody.
It's a simple question to answer.
...I think it smells better in here too ;)
Every encounter I have with anything related to Windows or Microsoft makes my life harder.
Our entire office switch to Macs a few months ago & now I never hear the dull thud of someone beating their head against the desk.
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
Notepad?
My UID is prime... is yours?
if several other OS's didn't exist which run perfectly fine on tons of hardware (*BSD and Linux). And the sad part is, M$ has all the vendors producing drivers SPECIFICALLY for their operating system. All they have to do is provide a stable kernel and easy/efficient module system for these drivers, and they'd be golden -- every advantage is on their side there. This opposed to Linux and *BSD, who are still more or less reverse engineering many of their drivers.
1) A company that charges $150 per phone call for problems with its software, has no incentive to create decent software. In fact, they get paid to write poor software. .net as a "Business Solution" as if we are all just stupid and don't recognize it for what it is: A bloated Framework designed to sell more Microsoft servers and software and a feeble attempt to kill java. NOT a software framework to solve your business problems.
2) Standards in Web Design cost the industry Billions just to write specific Mikeysoft Explorer Code.
3) The free Virus/Malware kit features since 1998 that this company just can't seem to fix with all the PhD's it hires and fundamentally, doesn't understand why LINUX, SELinux are going to become the defacto standard in CIA and Corporate computing security.
4) The Endless nights of pages way back when I was a Mikeysoft dork admin, just to reboot a computer at 3AM, EVERY night for 2 years. Some things never change.
5) The balls this company has to push the industry
6)The whole Microsoft Office thing. Gad where do I start? How about Incompatible with Itself, specifically designed so that Excel 97 Macro's don't quite import perfectly into 2000.
7) DICTATING to everyone that Windows 2000 is no longer supported, we refuse to fix bugs in our software unless you upgrade. If you don't we do not care if 2000 meets your business needs, our shareholders demand you buy licenses for all your stuff AGAIN.
8) Reboot the OS everytime you make a friggin change. Reboot! Reboot! Reboot! Reboot!
9) Trying to Kill Linux with the whole trusted computing thing and working on proprietary BIOS'es. How SAD.
10) And last but not least....creating legions of Idiot Admins that can't do anything unless they are lead around by a OK or CANCEL button. God help them if they don't have a setup Icon someplace! One company who single handedly has put the US back into the Dark ages while the rest of the world MOVES ON without us.
-Hack
Thanks Mikeysoft for all the fun and thank god I left that fun to everyone else 12 years ago when I switched to Linux.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I don't hate Microsoft. I think their products are often very good, given that software from any vendor tends to suck in various ways.
I *oppose* Microsoft because they have a monopoly position in markets with high barriers to entry. In this situation, competition suffers, and without competition we get stagnation. It is a good thing for me to spend my efforts towards increasing competition rather than decreasing it, which generally requires opposing Microsoft.
How we arrived at this situation is not very relevant. It's partly Microsoft's doing, partly not. The computer industry suffers from structural network effects that drive the marketplace towards monopolies; that's not Microsoft's fault. But Microsoft certainly did (and does) many ethical and unethical things to reach and maintain its position.
People tend to think that if you oppose Microsoft, you must also hate them, but it's not so.
I was working in Japan, near Tokyo, for a company that manufactured medical imaging equipment - MRI, CT etc. At one point I had to create a small team to work on technical documentation, which found us setting up several PC's with Windows. One of the people I had on the team was a Chinese gentleman, who had left China where he was a college professor.
One day, his computer had a typical Windows lock-up & bluescreen and he asked me for help. As the box rebooted, I held down the keys that let you bypass the initial splash screens and go right to the desktop. He was surprised and I asked why? He said he didn't imagine you could avoid the splash screens if you wished and I told him, sure, why not...they don't do anything but advertise MS Windows. He thought for a moment and then smiled and said "Ah...brainwashing!"
I had to laugh, of course. After all, who better to cut to the truth of why those screens were there, than someone who had left his homeland in an effort to avoid a lifetime of such treatment.
MS is for MS...never customers. This has always been the situation and one many of us are not comfortable accepting.
Other reasons:
- MS makes a habit of rewriting history (Gates did not write DOS, etc).
- Investing in MS is risking having your own money used against you in the marketplace.
"if it wasn't for Microsoft, we would probably still be using IBM PC's." You meant to say the Amiga, right? But in that case, Linux and BSD would also have had no competition.
Basically, my "hatred" (*hate* is such a strong word... i would prefer disgust) stems from several different things:
-stagnation: Microsoft is responsible for a stagnation of innovation on the pc. Ranging from the _very_ late adoption of technologies (example: USB) to the complete ignorance of standards(html, css), they have hurt innovation
-interoperability/lock-in: the small changes in the SMB-protocol from version to version are jsut there to block interoperability. same goes for NTFS.
-sucky products: none of their releases are good. Almost every single product they have released begins to get useful a year after the release, when the most annoying bugs have been fixed. I could tolerate that with a small software-hut which _needs_ the money NOW, but Microsoft as enough money to wait till the product is really ready for the market.
-sucky products/bloat: I don't think that luna should eat away 140Mb of my RAM. I don't think that Word 2004 offers enough new features to warrant a tenfold increase of RAM-usage compared to Word 97
-lies: Microsoft lies. See their FUD about linux. See what the "great business deals" and "alliances" have gotten the companies Microsoft partnered with: every single company that worked with Microsoft lost.
-Content industry's bitch: DRM in every format, downscaling of videos, etc. _I_ am the customer, not the MPAA.
-arrogant CEO: Balmer must go.
-arrogant company: A company that want's to crush and kill everybody else is mad. Competition yes, killing for the killing's sake: NO.
...It's contempt. 8^)
Okay, I jest. There are number of very good reasons the like Microsoft - their office automation products do make life easier - but it's just not enough for me. The fundamental problems are threefold:
There's no way to guarantee my work. (This is actually a complaint about proprietary software in general, but Microsoft is the worst about this.) On two or three significant occasions, I have been completely burned after commitments that I made to a client based on technical assurances I'd received that proved to be false. I've been forced into unsustainable situations because there was a huge gap between what the product promised to do and what it actually did. Dealing with the last 20% of any task is difficult at the best of times, but the number of times on Windows that I've been forced to accept that things are never going to run as designed because of shortcomings in the technology... they're too many to count.
Ultimately, the only way I could maintain my professional reputation (and my pride) was to walk away from the Microsoft Windows platform completely and to live with Linux and FOSS. It's not that it's better, per se, but at least I can make things work exactly as they're designed, without being completely at the mercy of someone else's market research and development cycle. In the worst case scenario, I can always keep a client happy by paying someone to provide a patch expressly for them. I may lose my shirt on that contract, but I'll never have a pissed-off client, and in my business, that's golden.
They're holding us back. I did a back-of-the-napkin calculation the other day, to see how much time I'd spent that week dealing with Windows' shortcomings instead of actually improving our systems. It was a fairly direct equation, because I was working on developing a really cool network monitoring toolkit that week. Every hour I spent at someone else's desk cleaning up crap delayed the arrival of this very useful tool by an hour. I calculated that I work 30% slower than I could do if I didn't have to deal with spyware, trojans, spambots etc.
That's insane. Seriously. People who don't know anything besides Microsoft will tell you that exploits happen to everyone, that if it wasn't MS, it would be someone else. But it just ain't so. Today's Word exploit is stunning evidence that Microsoft practices... whatever the opposite of security is. No I don't mean 'insecure'; they're apps are that, but their design is more like 'anti-secure'. I mean, who in their right mind stores pointers for memory move operations in a word processing file?
They are trying to break the Internet. The first points disappointed me, as a geek. But this point makes me angry. For Microsoft, dominance is not sufficient. They don't play to win; they play to destroy. And the tactics they use are bad for everyone. They oppose open systems, protocols - anything that makes it easier for people to share. This selfishness of spirit is manifest in every aspect of their business, and it impacts directly on my ability to do my job.
I don't mind having to explain the relative merits of a FOSS solution to an MS-only one. But when I have to respond to lies that are spread about my stock in trade, I get upset. When I spend more time countering FUD than actually talking tech, I get upset.
This is not competition. This is the opposite. It's playing dirty. It's cheating, and I'm tired of it.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I'm a sysadmin... in a previous lifetime I had to run Windows.... why do I hate windows?
* The six days in a row in 1997/1998 I had to battle hackers that had figured out how to reboot our windows nt 5.1 server from the net (firewalls weren't what they are today).
* The countless weeks I lost because of Exchange server disk becoming full;
* For exchange sucking such major ass ( before version 6.0) and failing when a disk filled up
* The countless hours I lost when SSL suddenly stopped working in NT one day,
* The unbearable and unthinkable number of times I've had to re-install windows when it became corrupt,
* The countless hours at christmas, thanksgiving and every other trip home I had to spend on the number of spyware and viri I've had to remove on my parent's computers (Because they have an app they need that needs activex)
And while I'm at it...
* Because of ActiveX and other closed systems,
* Because every OS upgrade requires new hardware, unlike Mac OS where ever OS Upgrade runs FASTER on older hardware than the old OS
And speaking of OS...
* Because of the registry, fuck the registry and fuck all the fucking registry hacks I've ever had to do,
* Because of the way they code their apps assembly line style in Redmond,
* Because of Bill Gates, and his hate of everything open and open source.
Thank you, you bastard troll for making me type this.
- Some people might "hate" MS the way they hate Hitler or Stalin.
- Some people might "hate" MS in the sense that they wish them harm. They'd get a little thrill of pleasure if they saw MS's stock take a nose-dive.
- Some people might "hate" MS in the sense that they hate getting spam from 0wned Windows boxes, or they hate it when their bank's web site only works in IE, or they hate it when people send them Word documents that could just as well have been sent as plain text, or they hate it when they're required to provide a resume in Word format.
- Some people might "hate" MS in the sense that they don't like Windows, but it's the one they have to use at work.
- Some people might "hate" MS in the sense that Windows would be their third or fourth choice of operating system, but they're perfectly happy running their first choice. (That would describe me.)
If the OP had bothered to tell us what this project was about, we might be able to help him more. Is it a school project? A business project? Is the vagueness because the OP didn't bother thinking carefully about the definition of the project, or because he has thought it through carefully, but didn't bother telling us? Are we interested in negative attitudes towards MS from the point of view of someone in the advertising business? Someone in the software business? Someone doing a case study for business school?Find free books.
I'll admit Microsoft products aren't perfect, hell they have a lot of problems. But I mean, claiming that every alternative you've used is better? I think that's complete bullshit.
I know a lot of people on here look at Linux with adoring eyes, but come on, it's not ready for the desktop. I want to install an OS, and have it work. My printer. My camera. My weird NIC. My DVDRW burner. My 2 month old Video Card. Maybe I should go Mac then? That really doesn't solve the problem because it's hardware controlled (though I do have a Mac and love it). But Mac's office suite is - surprise! - Microsoft Office. Open Office sucks, period. Make it fast on OSX and maybe i'd say otherwise.
Anyways, the whole point of this is that claiming that all alternatives available are better is a pretty broad and stupid statement. I would say I even enjoy Office 2007 quite a bit.
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
Why I hate Microsoft?
It's their bully tactics. They beat Netscape by employing their monopoly to crush the competition. They violated Stac Inc.'s intellectual property with DblSpace and used their vast reserves to cash to keep from having to make it right. They bought Bungie and delayed the release of Halo for the Mac and Windows platforms just to have an XBox only app at launch. WGA. Software "activation".
What really burns me up is that after 20 years of Microsoft's horrible behavior, we actually have stupid assholes talking about making Bill Gates President of the USA.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
For my generation in particular, it was the way we were raised. For both my boyfriend and I, it was our family life too. We both have dads who are computer programmers. They both talk about the good ole days before there was Microsoft. We both also remember the days of Lemmings. We weren't taught to hate Microsoft. We were taught that there's more to life than just Microsoft. However, I have to say, I personally respect Microsoft. Their goal was to provide an operating system and set of software for the average customer. I think they hit the nail on the head.
I hate Microsoft for some very simple reasons
In short, due to their poor products they've trained three generations of computer users to think that computing is inherently mysterious, and computers are inherently unstable.
I know of operations and management people that think it's normal to reboot UNIX systems and J2EE servers on a nightly basis. When you inform them that a little bit of effort could solve the problem, they calmly look at you and say, "What problem?"
For those of us old enough to remember writing VxD's in C in Windows 3.1, the only 32-bit flat compiler available was Watcom, which suited us just fine as it was far superior to the uSoft compilers if its day. When Win32 came out (mandatory in Win95), Microsoft wanted that market and had their own barely operable 32-bit compiler. They required "Dynamically loadable" VxDs for all 32-bit apps. The new Microsoft linker (required to build VxDs from already-compiled object files) accepted the same COFF object files as the old linker as well as the new proprietary object file format produced by Microsoft's compiler.
"Somehow," the new linker had all sorts of bugs in its handling of COFF but handled the proprietary format just fine. EVERYONE writing windows drivers had to switch. Don't forget that writing drivers usually requires a lot of compiler pragmas that have to be redone to port from one compiler to another.
Now, perhaps this was a mistake rather than an abuse...
1. Up to that date, even Microsoft had been using the Watcom compiler. (You don't really think they wrote all their drivers in assembly)
2. The choice to make the old VxD format inoperable in the new systems was totally elective and synchronized to their theft of the compiler market. In fact, for a few product releases, we actually had a Watcom-based driver with 90% of the code and a "proxy" built with the Microsoft compiler just to trick the system into allowing it to work.
This is one of many many stories where Microsoft has used their dominance to bully their way into a business, notwithstanding the competitors who were cleaning their clocks on a previously level playing field. They did this to the detriment of their customers for sure as well as to the people that had built a legitimate business with a superior product.
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.)
The Windows operating system is like a skyscraper built on a weak and swampy foundation. It sways and it creaks, and it requires massive amounts of labor to make it stable. Windows is overly complicated spaghetti code built on ancient legacy structures (eg. the registry in XP). The amount of money spent on maintaining this monstrosity of an operating system is a drag on the high tech economy. Microsoft employs a huge number of brilliant programmers, who labor to hack windows into a usable structure. The effort of those programmers would be better spent working on other more elegant and technically sound projects.
The only way Microsoft will end up with a truly modern operating system will be if they nuke the old system and start from scratch, the way that Apple did with OS X. They could then support legacy applications using some form of emulation or virtualization. If they did this, they would decrease the crippling complexity of windows, and would likely dramatically decrease their development costs, while at the same time increasing security and stability.
Also, I don't entirely agree with the argument that Windows is complicated because it has to support such a wide variety of hardware. If an operating system has a clear and open way of interacting with hardware, then hardware companies will write their drivers to that clear and open interface, and the operating system will easily be compatible with a wide variety of hardware. In some sense, a clear and open hardware and software interface will bring simplicity rather than complexity.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
OpenOffice.org isn't the best alternative to MS Office. It's the most similar alternative.
The alternative to MS Office is a whole bunch of different programs, depending on what you want to do. Scientific papers? LaTeX. Newsletters? Scribus, PageMaker, etc. Ordinary business documents? Wordperfect. Photo editing? Photoshop. The list goes on.
As for this statement:
I want to install an OS, and have it work.I'm totally amazed that you have the audacity to say that, in reference to Windows, here. One of people's biggest complaints about Windows has been that you can never be sure that it'll work, even if it did before.
http://outcampaign.org/
Microsoft products as a rule aren't stable, are expensive, Aren't secure inspite of draconian security, often aren't compatible with other Microsoft products, are often hard to configure(couldn't get the new machine I built on line, did I mention I hate XP?), and they always love to harass you constantly about how important and how much it's to your benefit to update which is a pain if the machine is off line. I can go on but you can get the picture. Compared to Microsoft I find Macs a joy to use. The downsides are they aren't nessaccarily stable with Windows ported software, although they tend to be rock solid with native software. Limited software availible, it's what keeps me using Windows. And limited options for upgrading, can't build your own. Granted their stock machines tend to be pretty sweet so it's not that painful. They used to be expensive but for prebuilts they have gotten quite reasonable. Did I mention they are actually fun to use?
Am I dumping Windows? Wish I could. They are threatening again to go totally internet based after Vista. That may be the final straw to get me to dump Windows. Gee we can't make it secure on the internet so lets go internet only! That's a trainwreck I'd prefer to avoid. The real reason to go internet and subscription based is profit. Already people have been questioning for years why upgrade when the current version does what I need? Hey I'm using a three year old version of Open Office and I'm happy. Other than graphics and security there aren't many reasons for most to upgrade. They'd like to lock everyone into a pay as you go model. Look at it this way. Say $80 of your computer purchase is OS, Vista is more but I don't know the numbers on it. Okay that's a one time $80 you make off a customer who if you are lucky will upgrade on average every two years. Let's change that to a flat $20 a month. Well within that same upgrade cycle they just paid you $480. You don't have to be an accountant to see why Bill Gates is so desperate to switch to pay as you go. Even at $10 a month they'd tripple their revenue on new systems. Add Office and other products into the mix and the average user could find themselves paying $50+ a month to uncle Bill instead of say a average of a couple of hundred a year. If they pull it off make sure you own Microsoft stock. Personally I hope people revolt and refuse to accept the pay for life model they want. Personally why I switched from Office is there's too much garbage I don't need so why do I need constant upgrades?. Everytime I slipped, I'm a lousy typist, and hit the wrong set of keys it would do something I didn't want. Open Office just plain works and no stupid paperclip or the godawful red type showing me every "mistake" I made including proper names. Drove me nuts. I think the latest version of Open Office has the red type but it's easy to turn off. Some people love Microsoft products but most of us see a lack of options. They have an army of programmers and they still can't write a stable secure OS? I have no sympathy.
For years now that company has gotten away with some of the most slapped together, rushed and verbose code on the planet. (Some VERY good code too, it's not all bad) They flat out abuse us, and take advantage of an uneducated market.
What really started it for me was back in 1996. I was building a website for my company at the time. I was "instructed" to put 3 features on the site that was ONLY supported by IE and not by Netscape. Else risk our M$ relationship, which was critical to us (video cards company).
I was so upset. Not, "only use features support by both" but they must NOT work in Netscape. I was beside myself.
Still bothers me
The problem is that in many respects what is good for Microsoft is not good for consumers. This does not happen in most healthy industries, where firms want to delight consumers. In this case, Microsoft can coerce all us in order to make a profit. Let me point to some examples, it would be nice if we all together could collect a longer list:
But Microsoft is not evil, it does what companies do: maximize shareholder value. The problem is that their profit maximization, imposes a tremendous social cost on the rest of us. It is difficult to put a value to the social cost of Microsoft because it means speculating about innovations that have not happened, but could have occurred without a player like Microsoft out there. My gut feeling is that all the money that the Gates foundation can donate will not match the cost that Microsoft will have imposed on society.
We are the technology leaders of this world, we can stop Microsoft if we want.
Other people have other reasons. Mine begin with and revolve around their EULA. I tend to take agreements seriously, so I read the bloody things (unless they purport to be standard, e.g. I always assume that something which claims to be GPL v.2 actually IS GNU General Public License version 2 as released by the FSF).
... the application doesn't work properly with MSWind98.])
As a result of reading the EULAs, and a bit of thought, around 1999 I started looking for alternatives. Around 2000 I decided that Linux was the best available option, and began moving. Now I have one MSWind95 computer. It's about to die a slow death, due to lack of support for more recent peripherals. If it's replaced by a computer, that computer will run Linux. It may become a free desk space (which would be, perhaps, more valuable at this time). It WON'T be upgraded to a more abusive license. I don't think I need another Mac. Another Linux is plausible...but un-allocated flat surfaces are also quite valuable.
This is going to cause me considerable hassle, even though I've known this day was coming for quite awhile. One never seems to prepare sufficiently. Their are still captive files, created by some application that didn't document it's file format, and which aren't readily exportable in more than a minimally usable manner. Perhaps I'll get through this bottleneck (i.e., finding a color ink-jet printer that will print to MSWind95 via a centronics port). If I do though, this is just a warning signpost. Obsolescence nears. (The computer isn't obsolete yet...but MSWind95 doesn't handle USB connections. And doesn't handle the CD drive created by VMWare. I can't even re-install the OS in an emulator. [It's GOT to be MSWind95
GPL software goes obsolete just as rapidly...but you can figure out the file formats.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No. Yes. Maybe.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Don't forget how they changed the EULA for NT Workstation so that you were not allowed to run a web server on it. Netscape was underselling Microsoft( Windows NT Server + IIS ) by much $$$ because their Netscape web server ran just fine on MS Windows NT Workstation.
And since Microsoft is willing to do ANYTHING to prevent competiton, they changed how people could legally use the OS in regards to who they were threatened by at the time.
That crap you keep hearing spewing from Microsoft Executives regarding "Customers are asking for X,Y,Z" is and easly lie. And they can easily pay off one or two 'partners' to publicly say they want what shit Microsoft is pushing. but usually, it's all bull and used primarily to push an agenda which protects the MS Windows monopoly.
think MS OpenXML vs ODF...
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Without a dominant OS, issues of compatibility would be a thing of the past. Even different versions of Word have incompatibilities. If different OSes ran different software, they would all have to decide on a common format, like ODF, and the documents would be interchangeable. As it is now, MS changes things around in it's proprietary Word format and doesn't let anyone else in. MS stifled web development over the past 5 years because they stopped developing Internet Explorer. They beat the competition (Netscape) and then had nothing to push them (or copy from). Now that Firefox has revitalized the browser wars and Google is fighting on the internet front, we are suddenly coming upon Web 2.0. Applications online are the beginning of an OS agnostic web, which is should be.
MS has been declared an abusive monopoly by the US government. Yet, they are still continuing the same business practices pushing their way into markets based on power, not good products. This is the main reason I stay clear of all MS products. I will not give my money to a declared abusive monopoly. I try to push alternatives in every case I can in the hopes that one day, MS will not be able to abuse it's monopoly because it will no longer be one.
We hate Microsoft because many of use are the ones who have to fix it when somone breaks Windows or when Windows breaks on itself. We are the ones who have to explain why users can't receive their mail and receive an obscure error message when their .pst file grows to 1.82GB. We are the ones who have to scratch our heads when Excel dumps 2MB of repeating junk in an .xls file and the user reports an unresponsive worksheet or when the autofilter fails to include entries available in the column without sorting for RNG knows what reason.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I wasn't going to post in this "discussion", mostly because the original question is blatanly biased, and assumes a particular position is held by the reader, and then asks them to explain it... "So, sir, what would it take to get you to stop eating children?".
However, you're such a blatant appologist that I have to say something.
A corporation is called a "corporation" - and has been "incorporated" - because it has been "given a body" under the law to operate on behalf of a group of persons, and has certain rights AND RESPONSIBILITIES, just as any member of society.
The idea that a company, or its officiers, should put fiduciary responsibility on a pedestal, far above any other responsibilities to the society that permitted its incorporatinon, and on whose sufferance its continued existance depends, is relatively recent. Adherence to a specific duty above all other duties or considerations is the moral equivalent of the "Nuremberg Defense".
If a person can sell their soul, and if a corporation is a person under the law, then surely there are also many recent examples of corporations selling their souls.
-- Terry
This article and many others on Groklaw might give you a clue. Microsoft has:
- Destroyed Netscape and BEoS.
- Bribed government officials in India and other countries to use their operating system.
- Funded SCO's litigation against IBM and Linux in general.
- Bribed Novell into betraying the Linux community.
- Forced entire school systems to audit their computers and pay "non-compliance" fines.
- Profited off of Linux and Mac installations without paying royalties by forcing a per computer "tax" on all Licencing 6 customers.
- Slowed down the Internet with their virus ridden software.
- Made it impossible for me to buy the laptop I choose without paying them, even if I do not use their software. (The guy at the store laughed at me when I asked if I could just get the hardware.)
- Supported software patent legislation in Europe.
- Created the most DRM restricted operating system in existence with plans to extend the DRM to MY hardware and encrypt MY information on MY hard drive and give control of all that to someone else (read: Hollywood).
. . . and those are just what I can think of off the top of my head. I am sure I missed more than half, and no, I do not have time to provide links to all of those. You are on your own.All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Because they draw a line in my Word document when I try to type -------
Because they indent with bullets when I want to move the text 4 spaces to the right.
Because they make it close to impossible to have total control of a document, because suddenly, some intellisense kicks in and overrides it.
Because they encourage lazy web developers to create web content that can be viewed with Internet Exploder only.
Because when I try to save a really simple document as html, they give me a messy html with 85% absolutely unnecessary code, which I have to clean manually before I can do anything useful with it.
Because MSN for Mac can't use a webcam, urging my daughters to use a wintel PC for chats.
Because they give me Windows Media Player, a CPU-sucking mammoth, when all I need is a moth like Win-Amp (or a killer bee, like Itunes)
Because the give me big document processing monster, like Word, when all I need is a typewriter like WordPad.
But I do love Excel, and I applaud Bill Gates' spending habits.
-- somewhat_distant
My biggest complaint is their inability to follow standards.
I'm a web developer. I use Firefox, because I like it and it follows standards. So I create a web page with some nice CSS, and it looks perfect. Then, I look at it in IE, and it's not that it just doesn't look as good, it's broken. Internet Explorer has it's own way of handling margins, padding, horizontal rules, etc. They also assign default values to things that shouldn't have them. It's really irritating. Often, the differences cause things to break and render horribly. Then I have to get creative and hack the CSS so that IE doesn't shit a brick when it renders the page. The worst part is that the only reason I can see for them to not follow standards is because they "want to be different".
The second is lack of options in their software, especially defaults. I'll give you a perfect example. At work, in a corporate environment, we're forced to use Antepo for instant messaging. Besides being a piece of crap that breaks down all the time, it lacks options. If you click on a link, it tries to open Internet Explorer, even if your default browser is Firefox. Better yet, I have IE7 and IE6 installed, so that I can fix the above mentioned rendering problems. IE7 is what's officially installed on the system, but Antepo will open links in IE6. What the fuck is that? And how about a line-break? You hit shift-enter, and you would expect your text to continue on the next line. Not in Antepo. You get three line breaks, and you can't do shit about it. On, and about the links, you can't click on a link someone has sent you unless they place a space behind the link. What the fuck is that?
This is just my list of complaints from THIS WEEK ALONE.
Bottom line: I hate Microsoft because they can't design software worth a shit.
Aero
Some more I just thought of. IE7 breaks Dreamweaver 8. Dreamweaver 8 can no longer store passwords and logins once you install IE7. I don't know if this is the fault of Macromedia(Adobe) or Microsoft, but it's fucking stupid. Also, whoever designed Microsoft Frontpage needs to be burned at the stake. If I ever catch those motherfuckers..
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
I do not "hate" MS, but I will rather not use their software.
1) Proprietary software is not transparent. It is therefore intrinsically less trustworthy than open source.
2) Using MS tends to lead to dependance on MS.
3) MS's business practices suggest they in particular are not trustowrthy, and more likely to exploit dependence on them to my detriment.
4) I resent the fact that their software is bundled by everyone - I want to be able to walk into a shop and have a choice of PCs with different OSes installed.
5) I have found most of their software to suck (with the exception of Excel which is very good) and the OS hard to administer (lack of a single auto update mechanism for all, or almost all, my software in particular).
6) Their security track record, and their other shortcoming, sugggests that their attitude to theis custoers is "the sucks will buy anythings".
I think it's really more a set of points on which I disagree with Microsoft:
Point 1. Computers are primarily business tools
My View: Computers are very flexible machines that can be used for nearly anything including business tools. Since my background is in the electronic music world, I would have to say that it's nearly impossible to make decent electronic music without computers and software. Microsoft didn't seem to think this was important until Windows XP came around. But by that time, users like me had already been using computers to do electronic music for about 20 years with Macs, Amigas, and Ataris.
Point 2. Anyone who doesn't use a computer for "standard" uses is a "hobbiest" which roughly translates to: "loser living in parent's basement who gets on Ballmer's nerves"
My View: Completely false. We don't go around calling professional carpenters, electricians and plumbers "amateurs" when they work on their stuff at home, do we? Then why should people who work in the tech sector who like having SANs, virtual machines, and heavy duty OSes at home have to be relegated to the "hobbiest" moniker? It's kind of insulting, isn't it? If they lose the attitude about people who like to push the technical envelope and let them have access to deeper parts of the Windows OS to do it with, they'll gain new friends.
Point 3. Revenue is more important than, well... anything else that Microsoft does.
My View: That's not the way it should be. Making money should always take a back seat to satisfying the customer first. Screw the stockholders. As long as their stocks aren't going down, they have no right to expect them to continue increasing. There's only so many people who will buy the products and pushing out stuff that really isn't much different than the previous version in terms of actual functionality and stability is not a good approach. Ever. There is such a thing as being reasonably profitable and it doesn't mean pounding your competitors into the ground.
Just a few points of contention for me. In general, I feel that I should be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want with my computers. No one should be able to limit me in any way as long as I'm not invading other people's systems and causing mischief. If I want to write a software based DVD player (with decryption) then I should be allowed to without worrying about goofy laws that try to make imaginitive thinking illegal.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Let's say that all the restaurants and supermarkets in your neighborhood are taken over by, not only fast food chains, but McDonalds. That's the only place where you can eat. To you, it tastes bad, it's bad for your health, there is little selection, but you don't have a choice: you gotta eat. But you have actually eaten good food in your life and know that better food exists. Wouldn't you be kind of annoyed? Wouldn't you start cooking for yourself and try to create alternatives?
Well, that, in a nutshell is why many people don't like Microsoft and why they are looking for alternatives. It's also why many other people don't mind Microsoft; they don't know anything else.
I believe that this study is paid (in some way) by Microsoft to have FREE marketing material
Yes, they are smart, having all of us Slashdotter to give them hints on how to start the next marketing campaign
Yes, we hate them because they are good on being in the borderline of all the bad practices they do and yet appease the "normal" user and suck money out of him/her
Gates spend millions on charity (and so please the public), with the money he got from all of us, so he play nice with OUR money. If I want to do charity I decide who gets the money !
They are not constantly bad, unfortunately, they manage to be good enough to continue to be in monopoly condition to abuse developers, resellers, customers, but not too much to have a revolution, just enough to squeeze all possible money out of them
It sounds as though you have no idea what MS has done and just thinks of the company as a big cuddly teddybear that plucks money from the outstretched hands of eager customers and that the only reason that people could possbily dislike MS is that they have collected a lot of money.
Nothing could be further from the truth; I in general don't care if a company makes money, unless I happen to own it, so that's not it.
The problem with MS has nothing to do with money or envy.
The problem with MS is that they:
* Pervert standards (ActiveX, J++, Kerberos, OfficeXML, aso)
* Lie to customers (wait for us, we're the leader)
* Lock in customers with secret protocols and formats.
* Blackmail non-buyers bosses.
* Conduct smear campains against people who'd rather use competing products
* Lobby and threaten politicians who are thinking about open source.
* Do everything they can to limit customer choice to their own product,
illegally if they have to.
MS is generally a drag on the industry and we would all be better off if it was destroyed.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
While people complain that microsoft lacks functionality and treats its users like idiots, they miss the fact that they're successful *because* they lack the functionality that will confuse users. We technocrats have a tendency to think that just because we can manually configure network settings everyone else can too. Microsoft makes a product that does what everyone needs it to and they keep the market cornered because of it. The 80% that still use IE use it because they don't have (or don't believe they have) the technical skills to use firefox.
I have read through all of the comments so far and most of them do not reflect my position. I agree with the contempt that most folks have for the lying, cheating, dirty tricks, etc that Microsoft has pulled throughout their history. Just those are enough, however, here is my list:
EULA: I may have seen a EULA or two before Microsoft came on the scene but Microsoft pretty much standardized the EULA and lead the entire industry towards using them all of the time. I do not respect EULAs at all. The software is mine once I purchase it and they have no control over what I do with it afterwards.
Reliability: While their operating systems have greatly improved over time, even XP64 (their most stable OS yet) has crashed on me a couple of times. Linux on the same hardware (dual boot laptop) has never crashed. MS Access crashes on me all of the time without error messages.
Performance: I have 2 gigs of ram on my laptops. Why do I need to have 200 megs swapped out? Why does a newly loading program need to write out to swap as it is loading? Since the first version of windows, there has been a starfield screensaver. When it runs, every few seconds or so, you can see it hiccup. All of the stars stop momentarily. What is going on that prevents the computer from running so smoothly even decades later with incredibly more powerful processors?
Control: This a a big one. Why can't I easily turn off the netbios port on my home computer? Why does my computer fail to function without an externally listening RPC port? It is clear that the operating system was designed so that someone other than the person sitting at the keyboard would be in control of the computer. Why can't I tell my computer to stop talking to microsoft.com all of the time? Why are there a dozen ways to start a program running with most of those ways not being easily accessible to me? I own the computer and I own the software. Microsoft only owns the rights to copy it. Stop changing how my computer works when I am supposedly "patching" against vulnerabilities. I can no longer get patches from Microsoft because I know for a fact that Microsoft will change the way my computer works, possibly even shutting it down.
Security: Microsoft sees security as an added cost and therefore will never produce secure software. Microsoft does not even seem to understand security at all. How does clicking on that godawful popup thing in Vista increase security at all? Applications should only be able to write to their own directories and nowhere else. There should not be a need to grant privileges all the time to every program.
Quality: Portions of Microsofts software are written really well. All of those portions seem to be put together in a crappy manner.
Bleh, never mind. This is getting way to long and drawn out. Microsoft sucks and there is no hope for them. They have billions of dollars in reinforcement for their bad behaviours.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I am not the first one quoting that proverb in this context. Frederick Brooks opened a chapter in ''The Mythical Man-Month''[1] with the very same quote, a chapter about sharp tools. Neal Stephenson writes about tools in ''In the Beginning was the Command Line''[2]. Tools are important for mankind. They always have been important and they always will be important.
To put it simple -- The Microsoft world is not my set of tools.
It is not hatred. It is ignorance. I do not care about Microsoft because I do not use their products in my everday work.
Furthermore... I am a computer enthusiast, a geek. I like beautiful computer solutions. What is beautiful to me then? Have you thought about the style of this answer? Would you get the same kind answer from your everyday Microsoft user; with literary references? Maybe, maybe not, though I doubt it. The UNIX crowd are fond of words. Once again, it is not an original thought. Thomas Scoville wrote about it in ''The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature''[3].
Yes; you could say Microsoft is a beautiful company from e.g. an economist point of view. I have a great respect for what they have achivied but it is not where my heart lies.
One last thing. History. We like underdogs. Microsoft used to be an underdog when IBM ruled the world. IBM did a lot of good things back then but the grassroots disliked the monopoly. In politics monopoly spells dictatorship. We do not like dictators, we like underdogs. Who is good or who is bad does not matter. We will give our Christmas presents to the underdogs, not to the dictators. I do not say Bill Gates is a dictator, I do not say he is good or bad, but he is not the same underdog he used to be.
/jörgen
--
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was buying a new 'computer.' This is before we only had PC's and Macs in people's homes. I'd grown up with a long line of 8-bits and this was going to be my stepping stone. So, I clearly knew what I was talking about and went and bought an ARM based Archimedes. This was a beautiful 32-bit, sexy little number which would multi-task seemlessly (for the late 80's) and as a young programmer it gave me sweet dreams at night - yes it actually did. It had - and I still miss it - an amazingly intuitive, sophisiticated and visually soothing GUI. A very powerful and novel assembly language. My only obstacles were the older programmers in my family who worked in field. "You should get a 286! This is the standard. Everyone is using it. You should use it. You'll learn something useful. It'll be forgotten and outdated soon. What is the use of learning how to program in ARM assembler anyway?' ;)
I bought it anyway. Not sure if I was rebelling against the status-quo, however at that time, I saw nothing cool, innovative or exciting in owning a PC. My father had one. It was a simple-but-dull bit of kit with an uninspiring OS and interesting, but hardly revolutionary applications. A fun distraction, but nothing to tun my head towards - except for Zortech C - which first exposed me to C.. I used a mac at school and could instantly see that this PC was kind of dull.
So I grew older, learned a lot with my Archi(s) and ended up doing one of my A-levels in computer science. I had a PC emulator on my archie, but it only emultated an XT and now I needed to use applications under windows 3.1. So I got a PC and installed windows. A fun novalty - for a month. RISC-OS was still leagues ahead, but I needed Windows for school. Life moved on it was kind of cool to have a machine, where you didn't need to find so niche a group of people to understand what you were talking about. It was nice to be able to get lots of games, etc, but they were quite poor. PC hardware was always fun and easy to toy with. The OS however was obviously unstable - although I'd often blame myself when life would force me to re-install. Borland turbo c++ was another toy. Still not exactly the OS of my dreams. Microsoft still hadn't sold themselves to me.
Went to UNI with my archie and eventually needed another PC. I was using sun-os predominantly during the day and my archi at home. I sold a subset of my old PC and built a new one. I was running windows 95 and it had trouble supporting old hardware, which I still had. It wasn't my favourite machine, but I had tools for some of the stuff I needed. My home kit wasn't as good, so I lived in a lab. I used my PC mostly when I went home for the holidays, and then, I'd pretty much been living in a terminal dialed into our university servers. Windows was just the glitter around it. It was unstable and occaisonally cool, but Microsoft had failed to impress me.
I didn't yet loath Microsoft. Bill Gates, as embarssed as I am to say it, was my hero. A 'geek,' as I thought then, who had made it. Well, I hadn't heard of Linus or Richard Stallman yet. And then, a friend introduced me to RedHat linux - almost ten years ago. It changed my life. I could truly work at home, contained with my 'own' UNIX environment. It was like buying an archimedes all over. Getting my box running and especially my X Server was a pain, but it was 'FUN!' - after I'd got it working. Lots of my old iso cards worked without major issue and, well, I knew that my life had changed.
Various incarnations of windows passed and I tried them. Windows 2000 struck me as being less likely to blue screen - until it blue screened. As we all do, I'd often have to sacrifice my space time to help countless very intelligent people fix their very unintuitive and temp
OK - When I started my first tech company, in 1984, we used then-new IBM PCs with (ta-daa) MSDOS. It was a royal pain. My memory of using MSDOS was that whenever I used my IBM PC, I sat in front of it with a pile of manuals on my lap and the desk. With lots of luck, patience, and time, I might eventually get the machine to do what I needed. So one long-ago Thursday morning, I came in and all three of our IBM PCs were toes-up and gasping, each for a different reason, but all MS-software related, not due to hardware. We were in trouble. My friend and co-founder went home and brought in his new Mac Classic. I sat down and began to use the thing - a couple of hours later, I hopped in my car and went out to buy four new machines. Next Monday morning, I took our three IBM systems to the local high school and left them in the Principal's office as a donation - which, come to think of it, was a disservice to the students. I remember that within the first week, I'd misplaced the user's manuals for the Macs, and it didn't matter! So what did I learn from this? I learned that someone cared to design computer products that served me, the user, to help me move uphill in my struggle against entropy. And by contrast, I learned that MS didn't find it worthwhile to take that road. Every company I've done since has used the Mac. During the following quarter of a century, I've checked in on MS from time to time to see if they had gained any ground in providing products I could integrate into my work. Every time, the answer was no. My antipathy against Microsoft is manifold and complex, and includes the following: a. The Microsoft OS was designed by people (Bill, mainly) who had no care for, nor understanding of, customers who weren't interested in computers per se, but who just wanted a tool to get new things done. This orientation has continued to the present. At a time when Apple has long since shown how to field an OS and hardware that amplify the users' talents, MS continues to complexify, obfuscate, cripple, and compromise their products in the name of their perceived self-interest above serving their customers. A founder determines his/her company's mindset: Bill cared next to nothing for MS's customers, and hired accordingly for twenty years. And here we are. b. The Microsoft business strategy was designed by people (Bill, mainly) who took as their highest objective to gather to MS the entire blossoming personal computing market, whatever it took, regardless of the merits: competitors? take 'em out with FUD, not superior products; security? screw it, it costs too much to re-do our spaghetti code, patch it with a Band-Aid and shove it down their throats; whoa! what is this FOSS you speak of? We better embrace/extend/FUD/buy legislators, judges to drown this sucker so we don't have to actually improve our products. Make it so, Steve. Oh, you need more chairs? OK, whatever. c. Think of all the times you've sat through the BSOD. Think of all the times you had to use . Think of the $ you've paid out for antivirus apps. Think of the times when your legal, bought-and-paid-for copy of XP failed the Windows Genuine Advantage Nazi ID check (Youah papers, pliss!). Recall the time you've spent helping your friends, family, co-workers, colleagues, fixing freezes, recovering data, purging viruses, spyware, trojans, etc. - and ask yourself, with all the money and brains that MS has had over the years, is there really any excuse for their poor product quality and their heedless expenditure of your irreplacible time? Specifics, you ask? Well, yeah, there are one or two...thousand. How about the time I linked a Word document to an Excel spreadsheet, only to find that for every single value in the Excel sheet, Word would open Excel, import the value, then close Excel and move on to the next value. Look ahead and keep Excel open until all the values were imported? Naaahhh. Our user has infinite time, so let's make it take an hour instead of two minutes to import those Excel values. OK, further on that them
Paint is good enough for most basic needs, but Notepad is much too basic. One of my first actions is to load up a decent replacement for NotePad, whether its CrimsonEditor, Notepad++, GVim for Windows, Nedit...
Both applications have barely evolved over the last 15 years, but could have offered a lot more functionality without becoming bloated.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Because they spend most of their time not making it easier for me to use their software, but making it more difficult for me to use the software of anyone else.
My antipathy toward Microsoft goes back to C80, M80, & L80: extremely buggy and no support.
Most of all, though, Microsoft changed, in a totally negative way, the herd instincts of corporate management. In the pre-Microsoft success days, many companies tried to produce quality products, and most others paid lip service to the concept, since it was considered a positive selling point. However, since Microsoft got lucky with the IBM contract for DOS, shipping beta (DOS 2 & 4, W95, W98FE, NT4) or even alpha (DOS 5, ME, NT3x, various NT4 service packs), code to customers, using them as testers and charging them for the privilege, it has become a standard corporate mantra that it does not matter how bad a product is, one must merely "establish market share" to succeed. We can all see how well that has worked for the American based automobile manufacturers (the two of them that remain).
What the suits fail to understand is how Microsoft got to where they are (not the underhanded and illegal parts, those, they do understand). When the PC was released there was almost no rational justification for buying one. All the available software (Word Processors, Spreadsheets, Databases, terminal emulators, and games) ran on Apple IIs or CP/M-80 boxes. Additionally, PCs and the software were much more expensive and significantly slower. The difference was that "corporate buyers" wouldn't buy Apples, but would willingly piss away shareholder's wealth on PCs, 'cause "you couldn't be fired for buying IBM" (pure bureauratic cowardice). Once the PCs ended up on middle manager's desktops, helped by a generous policy on software piracy, they would buy one to continue work at home. This created a secondary market for software on those machines, in households with available funds, for games and other "home use" software, like screen savers, once the top-selling category of all software, leading to where we find ourselves now.
Bit of background: IBM originally developed the PC because the "Big Blue Suits" in Austin were very peeved at seeing so many Apple IIs in IBM's headquarters. Middle managers found that they could get results faster using the spreadsheets and databases on those than sending jobs down to the IT department. Having created the product for internal use, there was very little cost involved in pushing them through the normal sales channels. Some success there led to expansion into the "office machine" dealers market (IBM made good typewriters).
A bit more: the PC has the worst-possible CPU architecture that could be coerced into stumbling along because IBM purchasing selected the CPU vendor, not engineering. The engineers had selected the Zilog Z8000 (not Z80) which had multiple orthogonal registers and a very powerful instruction set (at the time) for them. The engineers liked it because it was conceptually similar to the mainframe CPU and quite powerful (first UNIX, Version 6, as I remember, that I logged into was on a Z8000). Purchasing liked to have "leverage" over outside vendors, so they selected Intel, about to go under due the poor perfomance and complicated interface of the 8080, compared to the 6502 and 6800/6809, while Zilog was under the umbrella of a small company called "Exxon", where IBM had no leverage.
I have 5 very strong objections against Microsoft:
t ml
... Interoperatibility is MOST important for successful use of technology because without that it becomes very hard to build more sophisticated systems that require components from various parties.
1. Unlawful monopolistic practices have led to a situation where it is hard to buy a laptop without Windows licence (for running other OSes)
2. Their technology is simply bad in all respects except C#.
The operating system has thousands of seemingly random places of configuration files, many of which are not understandable by text editor inspection.
The C programming API lacks definite power of UNIX filesystems/names (how many times have you seen a notice that says a file is reserved by some application?), that is, good separation of dentries and inodes.
The rest of the Win32 API is mostly random chunk that is hard or inconvenient to use. See
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/spinellis97critique.h
Ironically a more advanced API (the NP API) was instroduced with the NT, but it was left undocumented by Microsoft and thus it is not used for applications.
Furthermore, their technology is FULL of hacks and workarounds, but the main reason for bugginess of their system is BAD design and implementation.
3. They hostile towards operating systems by obfuscating and hiding their file formats and protocols. Think of Windows file and print services, Windows Media, Microsoft Word,
4. They are hostile towards technology improvement. Windows OS (but mostly applications) is practically useful with only x86 line processors, which slows down development of microprocessors. Windows is not even a good OS to take advantage of x86-64, let alone Itanium that they dumped. Fortunately, F/OSS operating systems made it possible to test and use those better processors with real applications from very early development to this day.
Also, the OS is a mess because they have REFUSED to fix it; the main drive has been money through gradual backwards compatible changes that has added to the mess.
5. The Windows culture is hostile towards maintainable systems. Where is the package management system that would be so desperately needed by ALL users of Windows? It would be simple to create a distributed package management system like apt in Debian, which would ease updates and installing software for all parties. Having a package management system would not even require Microsoft, but why hasn't Microsoft done it? Do they just hate convenience, or why is their update system such useless?
Summary: All in all, Microsoft has been harmful to all parties surrounding their operating system: the hardware and software people, consumers, users and administrators.
PS. sorry for "gain saying", it would take hours and hours to write comprehensive explanations of these points.
The origin of bad feeling for microsoft was never it's size but it's actions.
Microsoft was one of the first company to realise that user friendliness may be the single most important aspect of software design in the eyes of the consumer. For example, previously when using various text editors you had to remember loads of different key combinations for each of them to perform common commands like copy and paste.
I remember when I first used MS Edit, I had copied something to the clipboard and was trying to figure out which shortcut keys would paste it. The first one I tried (Shift-Ins) worked. I thought I'd been lucky only to find out a few weeks later that a friend, who was used to using a different text editor had found a different shortcut key to do the same thing. MS had included all the different shortcut keys combinations it could so, whichever software it's users came from, they would feel comfortable in MS Edit.
This is the kind of innovation (aestetic rather than technical) that made MS grow to such a huge size today.
Now, while having such a large percentage of any major global resource controlled by a single company is enough reason to cause a bit of discomfort, in this case of MS there have been many cases of that power actually being misused. Which serves to justify and multiply that discomfort into distate.
Some examples:-
Mis-use of wide customer base:
In the days of MS-DOS 4 it was said that if you wrote exactly the same program in Microsoft C and in Borland C and ran them on an MS-DOS machine, even if they both compiled into the same machine code, the one written in Borland C would run slower. This is becuase each of the compilers sign the executables they create differently. MS-Dos would simply look at the signature and decide whether to slow it down or not. The result would be that, since most people used MS-DOS, people would assume the MS C compiler was better.
Mis-use of deeper pockets:
One tactic that was very popular with MS in the early days of windows was to add "free" software to windows which the competition was already selling. Since every one with a windows operating system will already have the software, only a tiny fraction of users will bother paying for the one the competitor is selling (no matter how much 'better' or 'more efficient' its product was). Once the competitor has been driven out of business, MS can jack up the price of windows to compensate for the price of the new software plus a whole LOAD of extra profit since, as the Parent said, there is no other option left for the consumers.
Mis-use of inside information:
A third party inspection of MS Office 95 and 97 showed that they were using a lot of undocumented functions in Windows. This is the equivalent of a company that built all the roads and roadmaps in a city, opening a pizza delivery company which constantly arrives with hotter pizzas becuase it's drivers use shortcuts which are hidden to other drivers and don't show up on any of the company maps.
This will, of course, give an unfair advantage to it's own pizza delivery company. Not becuase they are better at delivering pizzas, but becuase they have a totally unrelated, and unfair, advantage.
News of breaches like this were all too common in the early days of windows. Now though, most of these have been forgotten but the animosity remains. And it's not helped by the fact that MS seems consistently less interested in producing good software as it does in producing good-looking software.
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
MS is one of the few technological companies whose corporate culture has succeeded in empowering the business-oriented types at the expense of the techies-types.
/. : it forces its competition to align to their corporate culture practices, and thus makes us lose some power at our workplace.
At Apple, in free-software projects or even HP and IBM (and remember DEC, SGI...?), engineers and scientists can be quite successful at pushing their own agenda forward, often at the expense of growth, revenue or margin.
This is good for the sense of aesthetics and fulfilments of the techies, but quite suboptimal for pragmatic business purposes.
This is how Microsoft has become the "Emperor", and how, by subordinating the techies to the business guys, it attracts so much hate from us techies, specially on
In contrast, I'm sure most technology-neutral people pretty much don't care as much about MS monopoly.
While I hope Google succeeds and keeps it company motto, it's clear that companies that are driven by revenue and growth have more chances, by definition, of "growing and be profitable" than those companies that also try to drive other agendas in parallel.
1) Their way of introducing file and network standards without making the standards public. (.wma
2) Not complying with other peoples standards.
Bad about Windows.
0) It's hard to avoid buying it.
1) No proper permissions on files, all users can delete your files.
2) Software must be downloaded for all task. The out of the box windows can't even split a file.
4) No package system and no certificates, The way of installing things is to run somefile.exe from somewhere.com. This caues A) lots of add/spy ware B) installing a new program often breaks an old one. C) You never know what you actaully installed, just because it was called zip.exe and came from zip.files.com doesn't mean it actually zips files.
5) No proper shell. You can't script things properly and, more importantly, when trying to help a friend out you can't just give him/her a line to copy paste into a terminal that will make everything ok.
6) Random behaviour. Things "just break" and it takes an expert to fix them; mere mortals are usually forced to reinstall from scratch. Windows also becomes sluggish after a while and "nobody knows why".
7) It spies on its users.
Finally, both Sun and Mac have made good commercial operative systems that both lacks most of the above faults. If they wanted to, Microsoft could too.
I've been doing development on Windows for about 8 years now - Mostly with ASP and ASP.NET. My number one complaint about Microsoft is their documentation. For instance, the .NET class library reference has many entries for methods simply state, "This method returns an int." To be fair, many topics are covered in great detail, but there are many more that are barely mentioned, if at all. A few years ago, I actually found an article on MSDN that stated that the Excel object properties and methods in Office Web Objects were practically undocumented. That's what irritates me more than anything. Microsoft has $ billions on hand, but can't seem to document their programming tools as well as PHP.
Hell is other people's code.
Hmmm,
"Standard", Merriam-Webster: "4 : something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality".
No, I'd not say that Windows is by any measure a "standard". It may be commonly used, perhaps, but it is NOT a standard. Not by any authority I recognize, anyway.
The Mac OS is not an aberration, either. It is used daily by many people, and companies, and is a very commonly used OS in graphics arts, the sciences, and education. It's use is increasing, as evidenced by a steady increase in sales and marketing figures.
Linux is also seeing an increase in use, and interest, especially overseas. Wasn't it Munich, Germany that just "standardized" on Linux? By dumping Windows?
Go ahead and give your own personal reasons for using Windows, that's fine, I cannot argue with your reasoning - your reasons are your own and you are entitled to them. But leave off the argumentative and insulting pejoratives, they do not add to your credibility. Instead, they diminish it by exposing your bias.
Especially when you offer no evidence as to why you call the Mac OS an aberration.
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
The Gimp is a great image editor, to be sure. But firing that beast up for a few piddly screen shots is a bit of overkill. Paint is much quicker.
Caldera subpoenad a large number of Microsoft emails and the attitude displayed in them is just reprehensible. They didn't want to compete on merits, or provide a better product. They just wanted to win, regardless of their own merit in the marketplace.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
If you know the history of MS, you already know that MS and its senior management are liars, cheats and thieves - it's documented and has been legally proved, in court.
Liars:
Bill gates told Paul Brainerd of Aldus to cancel Aldus' nearly-complete "Flintstone" wordprocessor for Windows because, Gates claimed, Word for Windows was about to ship. So Aldus threw away the code, wasted the effort and lost a powerful position in the market: first Windows WP, from the company that produced the excellent PageMaker DTP program. It hasn't been started yet. This is one major corporate CEO personally deceiving another, for personal and corporate gain.
Ask Aldus - but you can't. Its flagship products were bought out by Adobe and it went out of business.
Thieves:
MS stole the code of "DoubleSpace" (later renamed DriveSpace) from STAC's product Stacker. MS had been "evaluating" Stacker for inclusion in MS-DOS 6. Stac rejected the offered licensing terms; MS took the code anyway (MS-DOS 6.0). Stac sued, proved the code was copied, and won $200M. MS remove it (MS-DOS 6.21), rewrote the sections that were shown to be direct copies, renamed the product, and kept on going (MS-DOS 6.22).
Ask Stac - but you can't. It's gone out of business. With an admitted direct copy of its flagship product given away free with MS-DOS 6 and Windows 95, it went under.
Cheats:
MS compelled Central Point to license CP AntiVirus and CP Backup for inclusion in MS-DOS 6, under the sort of terms Stac rejected. (Do it, or we'll write our own versions anyway. No, you don't get any ongoing payment, but you can sell your version as a premium upgrade product.) Low one-off payment, all rights, no royalties, no comeback. It also knocked together an undelete utility, a defragmenter and a basic graphical file manager/program launcher based on IBM's DOSShell from PC DOS 4.0, thus giving away for free all Central Point's main products - Backup, Antivirus and PC Tools.
Ask Central Point how good the deal was for them. But you can't. They've gone under.
Cheats again:
MS hired the same team to write Video for Windows as Apple had used to write QuickTime's code for video playback in a window. The programmers did it the same way. Apple sued. Apple won.
Remember MS' $150M "investment" in Apple a few years back? No investment. That was another lie. It was punitive damages.
Cheats yet again:
MS wrote specific code into Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups to make it generate spurious errors if run on DR-DOS 6. Windows 3.1 actually worked fine on DR-DOS - better than on MS-DOS - but MS wanted to kill the competition, so it wrote routines to detect DR DOS, obfuscated the code and actively hid it in the Windows loader program, WIN.COM. DR sued and proved this in court. An acquaintance of mine, Geoff Chappel, was an expert witness, deconstructing and showing the code and the efforts to hide it.
DR went under. The product rights were sold to Caldera. Caldera continued to sue, and eventually won. But it was too late. Windows 95 included DOS, even though Caldera got it running just fine on DR-DOS in the labs, so you couldn't sell people DOS any more.
And cheats still!
You know what Caldera is doing now? It renamed itself SCO and is suing, well, anyone using Linux. E.g., IBM. Guess who funds this? Microsoft.
You could look at the petty, childish efforts to derail Sun's Java by adding proprietary incompatible extensions to the Windows Java Virtual Machine and then encouraging developers to use them (Visual J ). Then renaming the JVM to the MS VM, then dropping it altogether. This is not a company that cares about its customers. It cares about profits and killing the competition by any means possible, fair or foul, legal or illegal. It can afford to be sued, it can afford to buy off aggrieved competitors, and it's so big and so successful that it knows that the US government daren't touch it or
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
I would agree with that on some fronts, but there's one major problem with wide-spread adoption of the Gimp in the corporate workplace. It has a politically incorrect name, and having an icon, or even menu item that says "the Gimp" when working in say, a corporate office overrun with politically correct "file a complaint about anything they can" idiots, or a health care office that deals with physically disabled individuals who might see your screen and be offended, is a bad idea. I have actually had someone fly off the handle at me over that entry in my menu, and it took a full five minutes to calm them down, and I was still ordered to remove the program from the computer for "PC reasons".
In summary, unless you work in an area that doesn't have to deal with the public seeing your computer screen _ever_, and have laid back co-workers, The Gimp isn't an option at work no matter how effective it may be.
/me grabs the analogy and runs for the hills...
But then over the years, McD's introduces new meals and refines older meals. It starts to taste rather good and it's not all that bad for you. You're still wondering about the guys outside the doors handing out leaflets advocating their open food stalls; food that apparently taste wonderful and make you live forever. You try them out but find the food comes in those annoying plastic wrappers that have the "handy" tabs to open them that tear off before you actually manage to break the seal, forcing you to tear them open with your teeth. When you do finally get the packet open, you find the food isn't compatible with your fork and you end up trying to eat your peas off your knife. And they don't do McRibs.
Microsoft assumes that everyone is a thief.
Think of all the ways they use, telling you that they believe that you are a thief:
1. BSA.
2. License activation codes.
2. GWA.
4. DRM.
5. SCO lawsuit (Linux is stealing from us) (paid for by MS)
6. Advertisements in major magazines calling you thieves.
7. Reactivation required whenever you change hardware.
8. Secret interfaces in their OS, because otherwise you'll write software that will steal from them.
etc...
How would you feel if every time you went to work, your boss had you stripped and cavity searched every time you entered and left work, because he assumed you were a thief. That is how windows makes me feel. It's constantly probing you, trying to find any possible reason for calling you a thief.
That's one of the main reasons I prefer Linux. No anal probing.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Microsoft has been, and continues to be, a criminal operation. I wouldn't persoanlly care too much if they were only stealing other people's money, but it is darn near impossible to buy a desktop computer from a Microsoft OEM 'partner' without paying for a copy of Windows that you don't want, or need. I'll stop hating Microsoft when I can buy an HP, Dell, IBM, or Gateway desktop computer with no OS and the price of Windows deducted.
With pirated copies of XP I've seen around, installing windows has been rather easy. No annoying activation, and in the early days windows update worked nicely and there was no WGA (it's slightly more difficult now, but not overly so).
Now here at work, I've got about 50 machines with fresh XP Professional reinstalls. Since they've all been reformatted (moving departments), that means that for every freakin' one I've had the authentication fail (it only works once online). To fix it, I need to call MS, talk to a damn machine voice agent, type out the confirmation ID to the machine (about 10-12 sets of 6 digits) on the phone keypad, and then have it reject my number. Then I get forwarded on to tech support in India (judging by the accent) and have to explain that NO, I am not installing on multiple machines etc etc, and have them read out another 10-12 sets of 6-digit keys which I must enter to validate the damn install.
And we're paying customers.
So yes, while the issues of crashing and viruses had previously given me a certain amount of dislike for MS's Operating System, needing to call tech support 50 times (or at least several times for sets of machines on my KVM) has pushed me towards the hate spectrum.