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."

Comments

I dont *hate* Microsoft.....

[BWJones]

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.

Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I don't *hate* Microsoft. In fact, I have friends who work there and have made money off of Microsoft stock. Big karma hit incoming, ouch!

Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft.....

[arifirefox]

one could argue Microsoft products are shoddy because they support a mind blowing number of hardware configurations. Apple's job is much easier...but do you want to be restricted in what kind of computer you want? If it was up to Apple, they would be still on slow powerpc chips but it was the competition in the PC world that finally made them see the light. And you have to thank Microsoft for at least part of that.

Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft.....

[Niten]

If it was up to Apple, they would be still on slow powerpc chips but it was the competition in the PC world that finally made them see the light.

While we're arguing hypotheticals, I'll point out that if it were really up to Apple, IBM would have put the necessary resources into developing low-power and high-speed PowerPC chips, the lack of which being what drove Apple into the Intel transition. If there were no Microsoft, and as a result, the same level of R&D going into today's x86-derived processors were instead used to develop the PowerPC line powering Apple's presumed monopoly, then the Intel transition would not have been desirable.

You're right in that competition is a good thing; I'd be just as concerned by an Apple monopoly over the PC market as I am by the current Microsoft one. But I think the parent was saying (and I agree) that they are Microsoft's anticompetitive behaviors which earn that company such widespread disapproval.

Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft.....

[BWJones]

Perfect example... I had a friend at a little company called Bungie. Bungie was developing this really cool little application called Halo that they were planning on releasing for MacOS, Linux and Windows. Microsoft came along, made them an offer they could not refuse and they bought the company so Halo could be a "halo" game for the Xbox platform. This of course meant that all development of Halo for the Macintosh and Linux were cancelled and Windows development was significantly delayed. It was almost a couple of years before I was asked to help with the development of the Macintosh port of Halo. So, I and many, many other users of the Macintosh and Linux (and Windows for that matter) were negatively impacted by this very common business practice of Microsoft.

Three Words

[davecarlotub]

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Re:Three Words

[EtherMonkey]

Why do people hate Microsoft? In a word: Greed. Microsoft is consumed by a rampant, unrepentant, no-holds-barred corporate ravenousness for consumer dollars. At least this is how it looks to individual consumers, small businesses, and even most other large enterprises.

Some examples:

• Microsoft was among the first major, mainstream software publishers to charge paying customers for technical support on legally-owned Microsoft products.
• Microsoft was one of the first major, mainstream software companies to increase upgrade fees from what was a standard 20% of the original software price to what is now 50%, if you are allowed to upgrade at all.
• Microsoft was the first major, mainstream software company to deny upgrades to customers who don't pre-pay the 50% upgrade fee up-front when the original software purchase is made, with no refund if an upgrade isn't released within two years.
• Microsoft bemoans the cost of software piracy, but each time Microsoft has implemented technology to reduce piracy, it has doubled the price of the better protected software.
• Microsoft adds features to its software that puts competitors out of business, then removes those features and sells them as add-ons or upgraded versions.
• Microsoft talks reduced enterprise TCO benefits on the one hand while making each new release significantly more difficult to deploy, maintain and support.
• Microsoft claims that it's not predatory or monopolistic, while using its overwhelmingly dominant position in the OS market to drive out competitors to its application and development tools marketplaces.
• And yes, Embrace, Extend and Exterminate.

I could give more specifics, but I'm under non-disclosure.

Re:Three Words

[EtherMonkey]

Do you have proof? Did you pay for windows before XP.

I am a live dinosaur. I have owned and used every MS OS version since MS-DOS 2.1. I beta tested Windows 1.0.

• MS-DOS 5.0 was $29.
• MS-Windows 2.0 was $49.00
• MS-Windows 3.0 introduced CD key. Price went up to $89.
• Windows 98 introduced new 25-digit CD key. Price went up to $129.
• Windows XP introduced Product Activation. Full version (XP Pro) is $299.
• Windows Vista introduced more stringent Activiation. Full version is $399 for Ultimate, but the full set of features will only be available to Enterprise customers who sign volume purchase agreements and pre-pay for 2 years of upgrades, (Software Assurance), whether or not these upgrades materialize.

Ok, granted it is not doubling every time, but this IS Slashdot, and I am allowed poetic license.

Like what products [have been added then removed, and then sometimes sold as add-ons[

How about Microsoft Windows Antivirus: Included free in 3.0/3.1 versions, removed from 3.11. Now sold as Microsoft OneCare. How about a calendar application, which later was integrated with an Email application and became the first version of MS-Outlook in Windows 3.11, removed from Windows 98, and now sold separately? How about backup, which has been in and out in so many different ways that I lost track?

>>I could give more specifics, but I'm under non-disclosure.
Really, you didn't even get specific about the ones you mentioned.

Well, it's a really old and broad non-disclosure. ;^)

There's no reason to hate Microsoft anymore.

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:There's no reason to hate Microsoft anymore.

[badasscat]

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.

Yeah, that makes about as much sense as saying "murderes leave a hell of a mess - that's what murderers do. So yeah, no reason to hate OJ Simpson anymore, we know what he is."

It must have escaped my attention when it became the case that the simple realization that a person or company has committed a crime somehow excuses it.

Microsoft is a convicted monopoly. There is no more reason to hate them required. They will always be a convicted monopolist; you don't somehow get un-convicted after a couple of years. The penalties they had to accept (at least in this country) may have been little more than a slap on the wrist... but that doesn't change what they are. And it's something they only share with a few other companies in the history of this country.

I mean, why hate Enron? Why hate the tobacco industry? Why hate any company?

When it's not just your opinion that they've hurt people, but when it's in fact been proven that they hurt people, then I'd say that's a pretty good reason.

(That doesn't mean I hate Bill Gates; I think he's done a lot of good things. But he has not surrounded himself with the most scrupulous people, and he himself has not always acted scrupulously in business.)

Lack of humility? NIH?

[bunyip]

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.

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Clippy.

2 Reasons

[Marty200]

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.

Thats a symptom

[Catskul]

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.

Nobody likes a bully...

[mustard]

MS conducts themselves as a bully.

Nobody likes a bully.

Not complete hatred

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Spyware

[thedbp]

>Nor have I experienced any tremendous suffering (beyond what is expected with PC use)

That is the problem. Microsoft has conditioned you to expect suffering. This is unacceptable.

If you take a step back and read what you have written, you probably put forth the most compelling argument AGAINST Microsoft - that they have lowered the collective standards of computing to the point where people think its OK to get viruses and spyware and think its just 'part of using a PC.' Which, of course, it isn't, unless you happen to be using Windows.

One could argue this only

[Smeagel]

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.

Re:One could argue this only

[Nexx]

Part of the reason why their job is mind-numbingly complicated is because they need to support legasy software. A whole lot of 16-bit DOS apps written 15 years ago still run on current versions of Windows. These are not ports, or recompilations, but the same binaries. I doubt the same can be said of Linux or MacOS, especially with the latter so efficient at cutting off support of applications with major release.

Re:One could argue this only

[DavidTC]

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.

This is actually what's causing the damn trouble. Many companies who build hardware apparently can't code drivers worth shit.

Yeah, there are the certification things that MS has started giving to drivers, but often times they drivers aren't certified, and what are you supposed to do?

MS is such an absurdly large company, I don't know why the hell they can't have a 'drivers' division.

You know, in the real world, the purpose of an OS is to talk to the hardware. It's mildly ironic that MS includes all sorts of junk in an OS that doesn't belong there, but doesn't bother writing actual hardware drivers, which, you know, is something like half of the actual 'OS', with managing access to devices being the other half.

Now, OSes tend to come with a bit more than that, like shells and lots of APIs, but the real 'operating system' part is 'this is a hardware device, this is how I talk to this specific thing, this is how programs talk to me to get me to talk to it'. The fact MS is slacking on the 'this is how I talk to is' is just hilarious. It's how to write an OS without writing half the OS, I guess.

Of course, MS also doesn't include all sorts of other pieces of standard OSes, like CD and floppy imagers and image writers and image mounters, or network sniffing utilities. You know, actual hardware tools that OSes should come with. Even their text editor sucks.

They're too busy throwing in crippled applications like WordPad and Windows Movie Maker and Paintbrush. Not to mention various network clients like IE and Outlook. Almost always to target some competition.

Re:One could argue this only

[CJSpil]

The reason Paintbrush is the best application they've ever written is because Microsoft didn't write it.

I've got installation media for Windows 2.03 kicking around somewhere which came with my first Microsoft mouse and it's actually ZSoft PC Paintbrush which was bundled with the mouse.

The mention of ZSoft was dropped in Windows 3.0 and apart from support for things like GIF and JPG now, the application has changed very little since Windows 2 (Well if it ain't broke...)

Re:One could argue this only

[Foolhardy]

Microsoft writes lots of drivers. They have drivers for all sorts of standardized hardware with open specs, like OCHI USB controllers. What Microsoft doesn't (and can't short of reverse engineering) write drivers for are pieces of proprietary hardware. The same reason that the only good Linux nVidia video drivers are a binary from nVidia is the reason that Microsoft doesn't write nVidia's video driver either.

Of the 118 driver modules currently loaded on my system, 100 of them are (C) Microsoft Corporation. The others are 5 for VMWare, 2 for my nVidia video card, 1 for the nVidia nForce MCP net adapter, 1 for the Realtek 650 sound, 1 for the OpenVPN virtual TAP adapter, 1 for the crappy Macromedia safedisc copyprotection driver, 2 for Daemon Tools, 1 for Process Explorer, and 4 for the cd burning software. Of the non-Microsoft drivers that are supporting real hardware, that's 4 drivers for 3 devices. There are only three devices on my system that Microsoft didn't write drivers for. If Linux were running on this system, I'd want the binary nVidia drivers for video and networking (AFAIK nForce2 networking still isn't supported in the mainline. It definitely wasn't when I built the machine).

Microsoft definitely has a drivers division.
I do agree about Microsoft fixing the wrong things most of the time in their OS, though.

Re:One could argue this only

[mrchaotica]

Yeah, or just like how Mac OS X targets people who want to use computers but don't know or care how they work.

Oh, wait -- OS X does include disk image and network-sniffing utilities! And a functional command-line, for that matter!

If OS X can do it, Microsoft has no excuse not to.

Re:One could argue this only

[Bacon Bits]

Windows does use emulation for legacy apps. It uses the NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine) for DOS apps and WoWExec (Windows-on-Windows) for 16-bit Windows apps. Their 64-bit OSs have WoW64, which emulates a 32-bit machine.

Opposition is misinterpreted as hatred

[roca]

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.

Stagnation

[Alphager]

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.

First off, it's not 'hate'...

[grcumb]

...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.

Re:My .02 cents

[codepunk]

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.

Groklaw Has Tons of Reasons

[LuYu]

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.

Re:Multiple OSes are good - monopolies are bad

[darkonc]

It's not dominant that makes Microsoft bad, it's dominant, abusive and anti-competetive. -- that, and throw in the inability to get software anywhere near right on the first (and sometimes the second, third and fourth ...) -- that makes Microsoft bad.

Microsoft's (illegal) monopoly means that

• They don't have to compete on quality (The emergence of Linux has finally forced them to put some effort there).
• They can ignore community wishes (IE between the death of Netscape and emergence of Firefox is an example),
• They can force absurd prices for their software.
• They can prevent hardware manufacturers from releasing specs (that would allow Linux to build drivers)
• They can ignore bugs, and know that you're not going to the (what?) competition.
• They can do things like trying to force Israel to drop the Mac by not supporting Hebrew
• they can completely change how the internals work and just assume that people are going to scramble to support the new system (Me -> XP, and even XP-SP2)
• They'll sometimes break things just to trash their competition. The fact that it causes problems for customers is irrelevant.
• They can cause your system to self destruct if they decide (retroactively!) that your activation code wasn't so good after all.
• They can make it all but impossible for you to find a distributor that also sells competing products.
• . . . .

It's not the name Microsoft that people hate, it's the nasty things that they do in the name of ever-increasing profit and widening monopoly (while mouthing platitudes about innovation, competition and customer care) that people hate.

There's nothing bad, per-se with dominance. At any given time there are likely to be a couple of dominant players. If those dominant players played fair and were dominant solely because of good products and service (which would probably also include interoperability), there would be no problem with them being dominant.

Keep It Simple Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Keep It Simple Stupid

[Branko]

Bjarne Stroustrup once said: "There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses." (http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/bjarne-stroustrup-o n-c-and-why-software-sucks/1310)

This might easily be reworded as: "There are just two kinds of software: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses."

Re:Keep It Simple Stupid

[lpcustom]

That's true. We do complain about Microsoft because we use the software. I mean that's gotta be it right. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that a lot of us are forced to use Microsoft products daily.

I think a better question for this article would be...Why do people defend Microsoft so often? What exactly drives Windows fans. It's not their freedom. It's not the stability of their system. It's not it's ease of use. Maybe they steal Windows on torrents, because surely no one is just backing something because they paid for it. Wait maybe that's it. Could it be that the reason a lot of people are defending Windows is because it's the product that they bought. Hell I don't know, but this has been a question on my mind for a long time. I can see the drive behind defending Open Source Products. I can see why Linux and BSD people can be proud of their OS. I can even understand why Mac users are proud. I could just never understand how anyone could be a Windows "fanboi".

Some possible causes that I can think of would be:
1.) User didn't have a computer before 2001 and has only used XP(possibly used 2k and XP only).
2.) Purchased MS product so feel the need to justify said purchase.
3.) Stole MS product and is under the disillusion that the product was free.
4.) Has never even attempted to use anything else.
5.) Believes everything they were taught in school.

I could probably add to this list.

I'm currently attending an online class where we were comparing Linux and Windows. Only two people in the class had tried Linux. Everyone else had only used Windows. Those who had only used Windows kept going on and on about how user-friendly Windows is. I'm thinking, "compared to nothing, I can see your point." Windows is user-friendly only if you know how to use it. In a lot of cases, if you really know how to use it, you don't want to use it anymore. Most people really don't even know how to use it. Yet they'll stand up for it. It amazes me that they believe they are computer savvy because they can log into slashdot or digg and post their comments.

Keep in mind that I'm not talking about all Windows users. Some people have a legitimate reason to use Windows. GAMES. That's right it has games. That's the biggest selling point I've heard so far. Most of these gamers have a Wii, an Xbox360, and a PS3. Hey here's a thought. Play games on your consoles, and stop using that as a reason for using Windows.

There's a fair amount of Windows fanbois on slashdot these days. I'd say they probably outnumber the Linux fanbois even. So all of you, instead of asking us why we hate Microsoft so much, why don't you ask yourself what it is you love about it? They have way more money than you. They could probably sue you for a license agreement you have broken at one point. Their software phones home and reports on you without you knowing. The new flagship OS, Vista, is sluggish to say the least. You'll love your new computer you are forced to buy just to run it at a medium pace. But hey, you'll finally be able to enjoy those visual effects that Mac and Linux users have been enjoying for years. Oh and it's supposed to be the most secure version of Windows ever. So maybe it's not as secure as Mac and Linux, but at least you can rag XP users once you switch.

This may sound like one large flame, but really its just an honest question. Why do you love Windows so much? Explain why it's so much better than Linux and FreeBSD. Try to do it without mentioning games, cause we have consoles for games. You should be the one justifying to us why we should spend 150 bucks on an OS. We shouldn't have to sell "free" to you.

Re:Keep It Simple Stupid

[IIsMeYouIsNot]

Just a Few:

1. As a college student I paid under $20 for my copy of WinXP, but would have had to pay ~$45 for MacOS X. Although this doesn't tend to defeat your argument, it sure does lower one of the reasons not to use Windows and makes OS X the one which needs to prove itself.

2. I know how to use Windows. These were skills I built up before ever owning my own PC, mostly when I was living at home using my parents PC, and my Dad used Windows because it was built on DOS, the earliest OS he knew. What you say above is right once you get to know how to use Windows you don't want to anymore, but alas I've already paid for it and have a box which does pretty much everything I call on it to do, so there isn't any reason to need another PC or to switch.

3. I have very rarely been called on to know/learn a piece of software that doesn't run on Windows. I have on the other hand been called on to know/learn Power Point, Word, Excel, InDesign, and many others. This is excluding text editors run on Linux machines for my CS classes, but then they haven't cared which one I use so on WinXP at home I use Notepad++, and in lab on Linux I use nedit.

4. If I want a Linux box I'll build one and will be able to do it on the cheap. So I'm not worried about getting one right now, when I'm college style poor, I'd rather have steak once in a while.

5. My friends/relatives/co-workers/group-members know how to use Windows and thus I don't have to try and explain Linux everytime they want to do something on my computer; this happens quite frequently I might add.

6. The games, I know you tried to blow this off with consoles but thats not a valid argument, because as a cheap/poor college student I can't afford to buy an XBox 360 or a PS3 or a Wii or whatever. And I don't enjoy console gaming as much either so atleast let me have my own preferences in that realm, without just telling me that my preference doesn't matter. I don't own any consoles and don't really plan on buying one for a good while.

As a note I would not consider myself a Windows "fanboi" but I do feel Windows is right for me, right now, and I feel anyone telling me I'm wrong is really in no place to say so. Your choice of OS really boils down to circumstances and that is all there really is to it.