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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.'"
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.
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.
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
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.