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Why Does Everyone Hate Microsoft?
MrSplog asks: "I'm doing a short project on Microsoft and its impact on society. A considerable part of this project has been looking into people's perceptions of Microsoft and the heavily negative bias of that perception. Since Slashdot is one of the world's forefront leaders on Microsoft hatred, I wanted to know: just why do you hate Microsoft? Please be as descriptive and as thorough as you like. Counter arguments and positive comments are also appreciated."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
I hate Microsoft's products (except Project), their business practices, their monopoly, their DRM, their lack of ethics, their EULA which forces you to give up your freedom of speech, their proprietary file formats, their Microsoft Word specifically, and perhaps more reasons.
Regular computer users hate Microsoft for making them vulnerable to spyware, spam, viruses, being pwned, and so on.
Business users hate Microsoft for locking them in, for the BSA license compliance audits, the security holes, the endless patch/upgrade cycle, the high maintenance costs of their applications (like extensive downtime when machines need to be rebuilt due to some software failure).
Vendors hate Microsoft for releasing loss-leader products designed to kill the market (think Netscape, Windows Media, and soon antivirus products, BeOS) until Microsoft is the only one left standing.
Investors hate Microsoft (now) because their share price has nowhere to go but down (MSFT will not be able to continue growth unless they can find a new market to be in).
Music fans hate Microsoft for releasing the terminally broken Zune - and inventing the concept of squirting music files to your friends (3 plays or 3 days!);
Developing countries hate Microsoft for raping their economies (to the extent that the software isn't just pirated) because the funds flow to the USA. In many of these countries there's a visible shift towards open source and open standards.
I expect even Microsoft fanbois hate them for some reason, although I'm so different from the typical Microsoft fanboi that I can barely guess why, perhaps they got excited about some feature Microsoft trumpeted would be available in Vista (some feature so new and powerful that it will blow away the competition, like the advanced WINfs file system or the virtual folders) and then broke their promise before release date. I'm sure the fanbois hate when that happens.
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.
Personally I think most people here a very good reasons to hate them. I wrote windows software exclusively for over 7 years and still do on occasion. Over the course of those 7 years they did many things that drove me not quite to the point of hatred but more of a awakining. Little stuff like how can I code against the shell? Well it took years for them to disclose that information so that we could add simple extensions to the shell. I am not sure they even disclosed it somebody probably had to reverse engineer the api. They keep all this little stuff to themselves for their own benefit and to lock out competitors. IE oh yea there is another one, they linked that piece of crap into every developer tool, shell everywhere they could stick it not to help me out as a developer but to dominate the browser market. Took their advice, yea make everything run on transaction server it is the greatest, what now I have a ton of shit running on one and transcation server has been dropped.
Once upon a time I developed a proprietary solution to connect up com objects to a j2ee server, guess what happens, I get a call from a microsoft goon one day trying to buy full rights to the
code...why? Not because they wanted to use it but because they wanted to bury it.
How about foxpro? oops they bought that out and buried it, best and fastest desktop database ever
made.
How about visual studio, pretty nice tool but if you use it long enough you will start to find the
artifical walls put up to drive you further to their platform. Easy stuff is easy in visual studio, soon as you want to push the edge you run into some bug, or artificial wall put in your way.
Nope, best thing I ever did is remove them from my personal and professional life.
Got Code?
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/
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
No. Yes. Maybe.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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