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.'"

Comments

About Time!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about time this company was recognized for all the good they bring to our world.

Re:About Time!

[atanas]

Irony doesn't convey well online. I almost took your comment seriously.

Microsoftie

[orbitalia]

We all find it easy to bash Microsoft, their products, and their practices, and quite rightly so, but you can't really argue with Gates's way of using his riches. Even the most cynical would have to admit his heart is in the right place.

Re:Microsoftie

[kevin_conaway]

We all find it easy to bash Microsoft, their products, and their practices, and quite rightly so....

So why are they ranked the top company in a reputation survey? Seems a little silly since although Gates made his money from Microsoft, his spending is not related to the company.

Re:Microsoftie

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

...but you can't really argue with Gates's way of using his riches. Even the most cynical would have to admit his heart is in the right place.

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.

Re:Microsoftie

[ktappe]

Go watch the movie "The Corporation" and your question will be answered. And no, it's not a propaganda film--it's a very even-handed documentary that analyzes the concept of a corporation. It examines just what you said--that the people in a company are often kind folks outside of work, but how the attitude of the group can change when they gather towards a common goal of making money. On the flip side, it also examines how the public often mis-perceives corporations as evil when the corporation is really simply just doing what it was designed to do--make a profit. Highly recommended viewing. http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/

Re:Microsoftie

[jimstapleton]

Legal, Sales and Marketing... That's the source of evil in any company.

Re:Microsoftie

[jimstapleton]

Oh, and accounting.

Why? Each of these groups is about getting money and minimising financial cost at all cost, so to speak. Typically everyone else is usually interested simply in making a good product, and trying not to be hindered by these 3 or 4.

Re:Microsoftie

[Thansal]

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).

Re:Microsoftie

[thousandinone]

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.

Re:Microsoftie

[Pojut]

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?

Re:Microsoftie

[LuYu]

I suppose you do not remember India and those Gates Foundation brib... *cough* ... donations that were given to ensure MS software was used instead of FOSS. They also paid the NYTimes to play the whole thing up in a series of sycophantic articles, if I recall correctly.

I really do not understand how MS can be viewed in a good light. They have bribed public officials (how else could their monopoly trial have evaporated), bribed governments (India cannot be an isolated case), misrepresented advertising expenditures as donations (this is technically stealing tax money), supported bad laws (software patents anybody?), robbed schools (audits in Washington state and Licensing 6), and many other objectionable things which are much better documented elsewhere.

That is more or less the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The fact that these people voted MS as the corporation having the best reputation demonstrates one of two things: a) The corporations are right. People are a bunch or stupid sheep and the corporations can lie, cheat, and steal, and then use advertising to repair their image in the mind of the public. b) The survey is carried out on people who have no idea what is going on.

Re:Microsoftie

[xtracto]

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.

Well, I always thought the same about MS... I do not dislike its products although I dislike its MONOPOLY PRACTICES. Aside of that, as everyone else said we could argue that Microsoft and Bill Gate's foundation are completely separate thing... ... at least I thought so, unfortunately it happens that Mr. Gates wisely used his "unevil" foundation to /push/ my country into using Microsoft's solutions instead of Open Source ones... now *THAT* is bad...

You can read about it on this article . You might recognize the name of Miguel de Icaza who was one of the principals on the e-Mexico initative.

an interesting snippet:
"I thought I was going to be the only person for Linux," de Icaza said. "But HP surprised me, IBM surprised me and Sun surprised me."

Despite general agreement that open-source technologies would be more flexible and cost efficient, Mexico's Linux revolution was quashed after Fox met with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, according to de Icaza.

"Bill Gates flew down to Mexico, and they announced a donation of $30 million dollars ... and Linux was dropped," de Icaza said.

And here is where he used his nice foundation:
The software maker has also allotted $10 million to train workers in small and mid-size businesses, along with an additional grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the country's Vamos México program to be used to move the country's libraries online. .

Note that this "Vamos Mexico" foundation is being investigaed for fraud and corruption in Mexico.

So yeah, I used to defend Bill Gate's foundation with the premise that, even though the Corporation "Microsoft" was bad, that did not mean the foundation was bad... but the e-Mexico issue made me change my views.

As for your question:
Where exactly does the evil come from? How do a group of people who are not evil get together and do something evil?

My thought has always been that a Corporation is evil by definition, because the objective of any corporation is to profit, no matter what they do. You should see The Corporation film. They explain it very well. Basically, a corporation has all the properties and rights a human been has... except that it does NOT have a "soul" or "conscience" or whatever you want to call it. That is why it has no "minimal ethics" and you see corporations going to the end of the third world where slaving is allowed in order to maximize their profits which is what they do (Nike, Starbucks, Apple, etc, etc etc...).

Re:Microsoftie

[MightyMartian]

Rich men who have gained their wealth by trodding on others often appease their consciences by acts of generousity. I see no reason to forgive Gates or Microsoft for their anti-competitive activities just because Gates has caught some sort of a donation bug.

Re:Microsoftie

[jimstapleton]

actually, I use "evil" in respect to apple all the time. The problem is, they had been so evil for so long, it /did/ hurt them, so nobody cares about them anymore. They are finally breaking out of irrelevance. You should see more "apple is evil" soon.

The other thing is, some companies can keep better control of these sources of evil, so the companies themselves are considered less evil, though the larger a company is, typically the harder this task is.

Re:Microsoftie

[MightyMartian]

Let's consider that every group that designs a word processor is forced to reverse engineer Microsoft's document standard, and that Microsoft is going out of its way to sabotage an open document standard in favor of one which can only be 100% reliably opened under its software.

In a very real sense, the monopolistic practices of Microsoft over the last two decades has lead to a stranglehold on the marketplace. Each time it releases a free-bee, like a browser or a media player, where a competitor exists, it is attempting to wipe out the competition.

And yet, apparently, because Gates gives to poor Africans, the fact that a large portion of his fortune, and the vast fortunes of his company have been made in precisely the fashion outlined becomes okay. Good for Gates saving Africans. Maybe he can use some of his money to save the competition he and the company which is a convicted monopolist so gleefully destroyed.

Re:Microsoftie

[Pojut]

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.

Re:Microsoftie

[hutchike]

Re: (PeopleThatKnowTheName + 2*GoodDeedsDone) - 2*BadDeedsDone = Rating.

You don't need those brackets. You could factor out the 2 like this:

PeopleThatKnowTheName + 2*(GoodDeedsDone - BadDeedsDone) = Rating

Damn I must be bored today!

Re:Microsoftie

[Narcissus]

OK, but that's now. In the past it wasn't like that! In the past, if you bought a PC (from Dell, HP, or the guy on the corner that puts the boxes together) you paid for Windows because if you wanted to resell Windows at all, no matter who you were, there was only one way to do it, and that was by paying a fee per computer distributed.

Re:Microsoftie

[Silver Sloth]

Given that

GoodDeedsDone + BadDeedsDone = AllDoneDeedsThis can be simplified further to

PeopleThatKnowTheName + 2 * AllDoneDeeds = Rating

The brackets are not required because multiplication takes precidence over addition. However, they might be added to aid readability and remove possible ambiguity.

Bored and khama to burn!

Re:Microsoftie

[nasch]

And why don't those companies just give a big fuck you to microsoft's format? The lock in with ANYTHING from Microsoft is SUPPORTED by the very consumers that BUY from microsoft.

You just answered your question. Saying FU to MS compatibility means saying FU to their customers. Companies that do that tend to go out of business.

Re:Microsoftie

[Skrynesaver]

Not evil, just not very nice to know ;)
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.

Re:Microsoftie

[CDarklock]

> desire to dominate the industry

Isn't this normal?

> complete intolerance of competition

I don't believe this is true. Consider RealNetworks. When they led the pack in streaming audio with the RealAudio format, they made a deal to put that technology in Windows Media Player. They were going to make a lot of money from that deal. Microsoft, in turn, were going to get a great popular format supported in Media Player.

Hearsay follows. I have no proof or inside information on this; I was just living in the Seattle area when it happened, and everyone was talking about it. Some or all of it may be apocryphal.

When the time came to integrate the RA support into MP, Real supposedly delivered a crippled version of the technology that only worked at low bit rates and advertised Real's own Media Player replacement when higher bit rates were encountered. Microsoft rejected the submission, demanding that they provide a version that played all bit rates and didn't advertise the Media Player replacement. Real complied, sort of - they linked their logo to the web site for their Media Player replacement instead of their home page, and fixed the player to downsample high bit rates instead of refusing to play them. You still couldn't get the higher bit rates without paying Real and replacing Windows Media Player.

When Microsoft went back and complained, Real smugly observed that they were the 800-pound gorilla in the streaming audio space, and Microsoft should already know how that works. So Microsoft told them where to shove their technology, and built their own WMA format. Now Real is an also-ran, doing most of their business in the mobile market.

Is this because Microsoft is intolerant of competition, or because they are intolerant of being cheated? More to the point, wasn't Real trying to cheat *us*, too? Didn't Microsoft also make the choice that was best for us, siding with the consumer instead of with their business partner?

I've not always been on Microsoft's side in this argument, but I've seen a pattern: Microsoft, since the DOJ debacle, *appear* to be making an honest effort to do the Right Thing. They also appear to be getting pretty good at figuring out what the Right Thing is. I'm wondering why the rest of the world doesn't see this.

Re:Microsoftie

[ErroneousBee]

So a corporation (Real) acted evil. Kind of proves the point.

Although I've no doubt the if Real had played it straight on this, they would soon have been embraced, extended, and extinguished. After all, why would a user install realplayer if the Windows bundled Media Player played real just fine.

Looks like Real got out alive on this one. Ironic that it was their dodgy underhanded tactics that saved them.

Re:Microsoftie

[init100]

If you want to delve into me being over analytical, one could argue that it is the CONSUMERS fault that microsoft has reached the point that it has. If there wasn't such a high demand for it, companies could get by selling something other than windows while having good income levels.

If everyone demanded Windows anyway, I cannot see the reason to put those extremely anti-competitive clauses in the contracts with the OEM's. They did though, and it is now a part of the image of Microsoft in the eyes of those in the trade.

Re:Microsoftie

[CDarklock]

> Kind of proves the point.

It's *insightful* to say that when someone else is evil, that proves Microsoft's evil nature, because surely Microsoft was going to be evil anyway?

You people are on crack.

Re:Microsoftie

[CDarklock]

I actually understand that Real is doing okay with the mobile thing. They certainly have a strong presence there, and they don't seem to be on the way to bankruptcy anytime soon.

I liked RealAudio. I was sort of sad when I had to go over my website converting all the large sound files to MP3. I've often been the last holdout of an obsolete technology when everyone else has switched.

Re:Microsoftie

[CommandNotFound]

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.

Re:Microsoftie

[tomstdenis]

No. Visual Studio is tied to windows to prop window sales, just like Office and the rest of the apps. If Windows followed ANY open standards w.r.t. operating system calls, gui libraries, etc, porting from Windows to Linux or BSD wouldn't be an impossible task.

As for doing things at the EXPENSE of the customers. How about things like ... using proprietary undocumented file formats, exploiting internal API functions, purposefully messing existing apps (back in the day w.r.t lotus), not supporting industry standards, etc.

For example, getting users hooked on Office back in the day, and then vigorously seeking to modify the file format to make it harder to work with.

Similarly, with IE. Why doesn't IE follow the W3C standards? Why must people design for IE and then "the rest of the world". IE came bundled with Windows, got people hooked and then msft used it to depart from the standards, further locking in users.

etc..

As for internal specs being easier ... yeah for MSFT, not others. MSFT can develop applications for .doc [for instance] because the format is known internally, it was also designed internally. I'm holding my breath until Office can open StarOffice documents...

Tom

It's sad that people can be such sheep

[meosborne]

I guess this just proves that if you have enough money you can always buy yourself some respectability. People won't concern themselves with how you got your money.

WTF?

[M-G]

I'm sorry, but WTF does Gates spending his personal fortune on charitable causes have to do with the company? I would think that the typical WSJ reader wouldn't use that as part of their opinion of MS overall. I'd be more inclined to believe that the typical WSJ reader would have voted for them because of their ruthless nature and ability to make money hand over fist.

If there is nothing good to say about Vista...

[skyryder12]

then paint the company "less evil" because Bill G donates money. So, it is OK to bully your competitors, and engage in illegal activity, and be convicted of crimes as a company as long as your CEO gives the money to 'worthy causes". Welcome to U$A...culture of the buck....

how does that work?

[Lxy]

How does Bill Gates giving away his fortune turn Microsoft into a "good" company?

Let's say I own company X. I have a personal wealth of $300 million. I decide that I should give away $150 million to various charities. I'm still bloody rich, but now look like a "good guy". How does comany X get any credit? No one else at the company is giving away money. The money I gave away was out of my personal bank account, not company X's. Company X is not any better perceptually becuase I gave away money. Why would Company X get put on the "good" list?

Last I checked, there's still plenty of money grubbing rich folk at the top of the pyramid which is Microsoft. What Bill Gates does with his own money shouldn't have any bearing on the comany's status.

And finally, please mod me up because this is my 1,000th post to Slashdot.

Re:how does that work?

[dcskier]

bill gates and microsoft to the common person are one in the same. anything he does will reflect on the company and likewise, no matter if it's the case or not. even the slashdot microsoft icon is a picture of bill, err i mean borg bill. so yes him giving away his money will reflect on microsoft.

Re:how does that work?

[93 Escort Wagon]

"And finally, please mod me up because this is my 1,000th post to Slashdot."

Will do... oh crap!

hahahah

[iXiXi]

Give me a few billion dollars and I would be happy to give my monthly interest to the poor unfortunates. If I push the crumbs from my table and the dog eats, does that make me a hero?

Re:WTF?

[mikelieman]

Typical WSJ reader is a MSFT fanboy, because they don't have a clue what REAL TECHNOLOGY is capable of.

QFT.

[FatSean]

It's easy for the average clod to understand that the CEO gives millions to poor and hungry people. It's hard for that clod to understand the sneaky business practices, and upgrade cycle that brings little but costs lots.

Education

[pubjames]

The one thing that I'm afraid I really can't forgive Gates for is the way they have targeted schools IT budgets in the UK (and I'm sure in the rest of the world). They basically have used every trick in the book to make sure they always get the lions share of schools IT budgets, and the schools haven't actually got very much in return. And Microsoft has never actually shown much concern about actually helping educate the children - it's all just about turning the kids into Microsoft zombies.

So Gates' generosity with his money doesn't impress me, take money that should be going to children's education and you're forever a scumbag in my view.

Re:Education

[MyNameIsEarl]

So Microsoft is like the tobacco companies, going after children in order to gain a customer for life. An interesting strategy to be sure, but certainly not one of a "good" company in the terms of morally good and not in the good for making money sense.

Check out these links! ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, the Wall Street Journal (and apparently many other readers) haven't seen this:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la- na-gatesx07jan07,0,6827615.story

or this, for another example (and many others):

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la- na-gates8jan08,0,7911824.story

Wrong.

[twitter]

you can't really argue with Gates's way of using his riches. Even the most cynical would have to admit his heart is in the right place.

I can argue with the way he uses his riches. If you do more to know about it than listen to advertisements, you find Mr. Gate's heart is the same as it ever was. He has used foundation money to purchase newspapers critical of his company, the San Jose Mercury News and The Contra Costa Times, arguably to silence them. His spending on schools, as most of his deals are, is just another lever for control. At the local Gates high school, the state is spending nine dollars for every one he gives but he ends up with complete control of the results. His moves into medicine are backed by his "IP" propaganda, which has been a disaster for medicine itself. A truly cynical person would say that his foundation is just another tax shelter for his continued diversification and attempts to control even more of the US and world economy. Philanthropy is about helping people, not telling them what to do for your own good.

as the saying goes

[hany]

How do a group of people who are not evil get together and do something evil?

Maybe it has something to do with the saying:

Road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Or take a look a look at story covered in following post: UK Greens Declare Vista Bad For Environment - maybe the attempt to give customers "better experience" and also "satisfying *IAA" is supported by good intentions but here you are: at least greens consider it evil.

Re:as the saying goes

[hany]

How exactly does this saying apply to Microsoft?

In the same way as your description of your perception of people in Microsoft apply to Microsoft - you wrote it confuses you that some people claim Microsoft is evil claiming there arre good (not evil) people there. In response I speculated based on your post, advancing it along this path:

• people at MS are good
• so they they have good intentions
• based on those intentions they are doing things
• their actions have some effects
• one of those effects is them (MS people) being percieved as evil (by some other people)

Of course I'm not going to insist there is mathematical pecission nor exact logic in this. I even do not insist this is some kind of reasoning nor correct explanation of your dilema.

I'm just suggesting possibilities.

And WRT Vista being bad for the environment, aren't the people saying it just a little bit... crazy?

Maybe. But for example also people who make peace by starting war looks to me as having same deficiency.

:)

at least he's trying

[romit_icarus]

I know this is /. and MS bashing is de rigeur, but let that not detract from the fact that what Bill Gates is doing is admirable to say the least.

Why is it admirable? It's not that he is rich and has a lot of money etc. It's the fact that he's getting into global developmental issues and spending a majority time working on that than on IT. I live in India and I've seen the positive work that his foundation is doing in HIV prevention. Also on a personal front, he's moving away from IT where he has leadership position to an area where he is new. Yes we know that money can buy you leverage but then you could argue that way with anything he does..

He could have just retired to the carribean, bought out an island and enjoyed his wealth. But he didn't and so let's give him a cheer just for that.

Reminds me of the mob bosses.

[zerofoo]

Those guys used to give big-time money to their church.....and then go "whack" some guys as a matter of business.

The leaders of an organization do not necessarily reflect the true nature of their organization.

Bill and Melinda are probably very nice people, and they do very nice things with their money, but their company is a ruthless and brutal company. Microsoft has demonstrated, time and time again, that they will do anything to maintain their monopoly and stranglehold on their market. They have put the screws to their "partners" and customers, and have caused much ill will between those parties.

No amount of gift-giving, by a few at the top, will change that.

-ted

Funny thing

[WindBourne]

This foundation is about his wife's work; She is a PR person. Basically, they are looking to buy ppl and it is working quite nicely. But even in the early days of the foundation, you could see how intertwined it was with MS. In Colorado, a few of the small town libraries obtained computers from MS. I went into one and asked them about it. At that time, it was the lowest end computer that would run MS. More importantly, when I suggested that they run Linux on it, they said that they were prohibited from doing so. In fact, they were prohibited from running anything except what they bought from a MS site. It was deeply discounted software, IIRC, the OS was something like 50 and top office package was 150. Now, I do not know if that is still the case, but, it was obvious back then that the foundation was tied directly to MS.

Winning at losing.

[twitter]

No, most people still think M$ is sleaze. As the article put it.

The corporate world's overall reputation remains dismal, with new scandals emerging, such as the improper dating of stock-option grants to business executives. About 69% of respondents graded corporate America's reputation as either "not good" or "terrible," just slightly lower than the 71% in 2005.

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.

For the first part, 7,886 respondents were contacted online or by telephone last summer and asked to name the two companies they believe have the best reputations and the two with the worst. The 60 companies mentioned most often were then rated online last fall by a second group of 22,480 Americans, and each company was assigned a score and ranking based on those evaluations.

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.

Factors that have changed my own mind about M$

[El Cabri]

As a former red-blooded MS basher, I really cannot say that I've become a Microsoft fanboy either. I mostly don't care, and consider that PC OS technology has become a very boring field anyway. Here's a take at a list of things that have cooled me off :

• Windows XP is a fairly stable operating system, with no serious architectural flaw for office use, software development, workstation or hobbyist use.
• William H Gates III has stepped away from the company's spotlight and is leveraging his wealth in a remarkably, socially responsible way, making this accumulation truly beneficial to the world that has created it.
• Desktop Operating System peculiarities are growing more irrelevant every year in most domains. The general indifference around the release of Vista is the best proof of this.
• No true credible alternative OS has emerged after fifteen years of trying in each and every way : free software, commercial OS companies (Be), alternative OSs pushed by proprietary hardware vendors (Apple, Sun), etc.
• In the domain of software development, MS's contributions with .NET and C# are objectively superior to most of their predecessors (I'm talking mainstream environments, not niche or academic ones like Scheme, Haskell or SmallTalk). These are probably the best contribution to mainstream application and system development environment, since Kernighan tried system programming in a high level language and made C. They also have some of the best advanced research in that domain.
• By experience, I have found out that it is easier to tweak XP to behave as a Hobbyist's or developper's UNIX box, than it os to tweak Linux into doing properly all that XP does. Install Cygwin, a proper text editor, MS's free command line compiler suite, and learn how to configure the Terminal, and you're done.

They didn't poll slashdot

[sulfur_lad]

Oh, the sweet teenage angst on here whenever someone says something nice about Microsoft.

Welcome to running a business, you want to make sure you stay on top. Addressing an earlier post, MS does not try to create MS Zombies in schools, good teachers (whom I observe weekly) leverage whatever technology they have to enable content that helps them to instruct. Then there are other teachers who tell their students that the phases of the moon are caused by the shadow of the earth on the moon. I saw this being taught on a Mac, so obviously that's Apple's fault.

Honestly about 5 years ago I would have jumped on the "obviously this is false" slashdot bandwagon, but the honest to goodness truth is that things have gotten better. I have friends who are currently dedicating two years of their lives to travel around the world to various Global Giving projects. I've been trying to look at my life and figure out how I could do something like that and make it work. That Bill Gates has the resources to do it is one thing, the fact that he does do it - no matter what people here describe as a small percentage of what he's worth - is excellent. The halo effect means that whatever the boss does reflects on the company. To most people on the planet MS is Bill Gates, and so the impression is now good. You can add that XP has been an awesome product with an excellent run (that's not over) that has elevated the company (compared to previous offerings), and you get a much better impression.

And anyways, for the haters and the teen angst-kids here, if you don't use Windows then who cares, don't whine. They're not forcing you to just like they're not forcing me to run Windows Server instead of Linux (which is running) on my server.

lying with numbers

[oohshiny]

respondents gave Microsoft very high marks for leadership and financial results. But Mr. Gates's personal philanthropy also boosted the public's opinion of Microsoft.

So do the mafia and the Cali drug cartel. The reputation of a company shouldn't be measured by how ruthless or financially successful it is, or how much money their founders give away, it should be measured by whether they comply with the law, innovate, are socially responsible in their business activities, and produce high-quality products.