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Microsoft Tops Corporate-Reputation Survey
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Microsoft beat out Johnson & Johnson for the top spot in the annual Wall Street Journal survey of the reputations of U.S. companies. Bill Gates's personal philanthropy boosted the public's opinion of Microsoft, helping to end J&J's seven-year run at No. 1. From the article: 'Mr. Gates demonstrates how much the reputation of a corporate leader can rub off on his company. Formerly chief executive officer and now chairman of Microsoft, he contributed to a marked improvement in the company's emotional appeal. Jeanie Cummins, a survey respondent and homemaker in Olive Hill, Ky., says Mr. Gates's philanthropy made her a much bigger fan of Microsoft. "He showed he cared more for people than all the money he made building Microsoft from the ground up," she says. "I wish all the other big shots could do something like this." To be sure, some respondents still complain that Microsoft bullies its competitors and unfairly monopolizes the software business. But such criticism is less biting and less pervasive than it was just a few years ago.'"
Disclosure: yes, I work here. Duh.
I'm always confused by the way people claim Microsoft is an evil company. The leadership of Microsoft has never been evil. To the contrary, they do tremendous good for all sorts of charitable causes. It doesn't really seem that any "evil" layer exists as you travel down the chain. I can trace the org chart all the way from myself up to the top layers, and I can honestly say nobody I find anywhere in that chain is evil.
Where exactly does the evil come from? How do a group of people who are not evil get together and do something evil? Why is it that we can recognise everyone's intentions as being good and honest and pure outside of Microsoft, but then they come to work here and they're producing evil plots to rule the world?
I'm just fascinated by this whole thing. It reminds me of Klansmen; when a Klansman claims to hate "niggers", but then grudgingly admits he doesn't hate actual black people - claiming instead that they aren't *really* "niggers" - this is evidence that his worldview is fundamentally flawed, and the "nigger" he hates doesn't even really exist. It's a fictional creation serving only as a target for hatred. Is the anti-Microsoft opinion in the world similar? When does it go away? Will it take other anti-corporate sentiment with it?
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
I agree. Microsoft is helping to end world hunger. Since the B&M Gates Foundation started giving away a few full priced drugs here and there, many clinics and health centres in Africa that would normally receive aid and assistance from many charities are being left with almost nothing.
Bill Gate's personal quest for sainthood is costing the lives of thousands of innocent people.
The most cynical certainly can argue against it, and I've seen many do just that. I've heard comments ranging from claims that it is part of a deal to bolster intellectual property law by keeping those issues from boiling over in the third world where patents make medicine too expensive for people; to simple comments that Melinda Gates is the driving force behind the philanthropic use of that relatively small portion of Gate's wealth. More recently, there has been a lot of very valid criticism about the practices of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation's investing practices, including companies that use child slave labor, health care provider cut and run operations, and predatory lending firms that scam the elderly and poor out of their family homes.
Now I'm not saying that Bill Gates does not intend to do "good" but it is not a matter that is uncontroversial or which does not have another side to it.
Because Gates IS MS in most people's minds. Also most people are not familiar with why MS is 'evil' they just know that it is 'cool' to say so. However people are familiar with Warren Buffett's donation to the B&MG foundation, what that they have been doing in the past few years.
How J&J has been at the top for the past 7 years confounds me in all honesty, unless the scorrign is bassed on something that looks like: (PeopleThatKnowTheName + 2*GoodDeedsDone) - 2*BadDeedsDone = Rating.
J&J is a non-entitie on my radar (aside from a friend who works for a company that does contract work for them).
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
No, most people still think M$ is sleaze. As the article put it.
It's disturbing that M$ could lead the pack, but overall people don't trust them. The lesson learned is that the bad behavior of some companies rubs off on all.
Also, the methodology can lead to funny business.
The first question is asking people to rate what their neighbors think, not what they think. That's a bad idea if a large portion of people think everyone else is sheepish. The whole study, of course, is tilted towards the opinions of people who would actually participate in a study. My wife and I think very poorly of big dumb companies and are highly unlikely to pay attention to phone or online spam. If you look at it like that, it's not surprising that M$ came out on top of an online study.
It's hard to tell without details, but the general population is less sheeplike than you think.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Companies, nations, religious groups, and any form of organization for that matter, are often judged based off of their most prominent members, which in most cases are leaders, but in other cases are just simply those who stand out. Examples of this can be seen everywhere; Many people view citizens of the United States in a rather unflattering light, but that view is based largely off of impressions given off by our leadership and those people who stand out more, who really are not representative of everyone who lives here. Many people view certain religious groups rather poorly as well, but that judgment is based largely off of observations of the extremists in that group. Why then is it strange that many people would judge Microsoft based off of Bill Gates' actions? It doesn't necessarily make a viewpoint correct, but its just the way most people work.
Being FORCED? Then what the fuck is OSX? All the various distros of Linux? Homebrewed OS's? BSD? OS/2? Etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.....
There are MANY MANY MANY options out there other than windows. People are just too fucking stupid to realize that. NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE forces ANYONE to use windows. There are hundreds of thousands of millions of people in the world (and companies, for that matter) that get by without using a single solitary piece of microsoft software.
If they can do it, why can't others?
Living With a Nerd
Again, being fucking stupid.
Go out and buy a white-box PC or laptop. Or even better, go out and buy the individual components and put it together. Or get it done for you if you don't have the know-how from a place like MEI or Intellect (local shops where I live)
No force of windows involved. Many online shops also cost you NOTHING to have no OS come preinstalled with your system, yet you do have to pay if it is installed.
Nownownow, you are going to start the whole "wlel people don't have the knowledge to do that!"
So buy a mac if you don't like it. Or again, go somehwere and have them build a PC for you and install linux, or what have you.
No one FORCES a consumer to buy a computer with windows or from a big-name manufacturer. Should a company (in this case microsoft) be penalized because consumers didn't take the time to educate themselves before making a purchase?
This goes back to the whole cars debate. Should car manufacturers be held liable because they are used for a bad purpose? Should a car manufacturer be sued because I drove on the sidewalk and therefore used their product to kill someone? Should they be sued because I can use their vehicle to commit a robbery? Should they be sued if your brakes fail because you never had them inspected for 60,000 miles (unless they claim that their brakes last that long)? No. Of course not.
If you are computer-illiterate enough to buy a big-name computer, you aren't going to get it without Windows unless it's a Mac; if you ARE computer literate enough to build your own, you will put whatever OS you want to put on it. Again, people are not FORCED. They do have a choice. And again, the chances that someone who buys a big-name computer has enough skills to install their own OS is HIGHLY unlikely. Those that do have enough skill to do so and don't want windows will buy a mac (or one of the others that offer Linux, such as dell)
Your point is completely moot. Big-name computers with windows are NOT the only option a consumer has.
Living With a Nerd
The corporation is indeed an interesting film, the basic thesis is that we have gone from ocasionally allowing corporations to come together to raise large sums of capital for the public good but now any greedy fecker can form a corporation with the sole aim of making money.
While money is all well and good it isn't actually the sole motivator of sane people (note to Ayn Rand) and when it becomes so the behaviour of the individual in question becomes psychopathic.
Microsoft's desire to dominate the industry in which it's earning its money and complete intolerance of competition make it a classic psycho.
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
But I'm honestly curious. What was the Right Thing in *your* opinion? How should Microsoft have responded to the court decisions? What should we have done?
All the points you made were technical improvements. Yes, Microsoft software tends to be marginal, but it's the fact that it is *forced* on many of us is the real problem. Even if the software is perfect, many companies have now given their whole computing future to a single company. The OS? Microsoft. The office suite? Microsoft. The development tools? Microsoft. The database server? Microsoft. Various methods were used to get to this position, and improved engineering had little to do with it in the mid-1990s when this monopoly was carefully being built.
What should you have done? Lots of things, but for starters, someone should have been jailed for the so-called School Agreement that says (quoted from your website):
Count the number of eligible PCs you have. (See below for a definition of an eligible PC.) Then choose the application, system, and Client Access License (CAL) products you want to be licensed to use.
[...]
Eligible computers include: 100 percent of academic institution owned or leased Pentium II, iMac G3, or equivalent or better computers.
To paraphrase, if I donated 100 Linux / OpenOffice PCs to my local school, Microsoft would still get an annual fee for each of those PCs, even though Microsoft did nothing to earn that money. That, my friend, is taxation. And Microsoft's lobby would prevent any public officials from having this lock-in overturned.
Oh, well, I'm not worried... the farther Microsoft goes, the farther it will fall. It happened to IBM. If the timing is right, Gates' historical reputation will be as tarnished as Rockefeller's still is, regardless of how much money his heirs gave away.