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Microsoft's Ethical Guidelines
hankwang writes "Did you know that Microsoft has ethical guidelines? It's good to know that 'Microsoft did not make any payments to foreign government officials' while lobbying for OOXML, and that 'Microsoft conducts its business in compliance with laws designed to promote fair competition' every time they suppressed competitors. In their Corporate Citizenship section, they discuss how the customer-focused approach creates products that work well with those of competitors and open-source solutions. So all the reverse-engineering by Samba and OpenOffice.org developers wasn't really necessary."
My own employers have an ethics code which is 33 pages of closely-spaced Maoist gibberish, most of which has nothing at all to do with the ethics of company, or managerial, behaviour and much of which is actually exhortations to blind obedience for employees. All corporations tend to authoritarianism, and these are the people who actually own the world, while blathering about freedom and democracy. The truth is that anyone employed by a large corporation spends most of their waking hours living in a totalitarian dictatorship - could this be what is wrong with Western Civilisation?
Science fiction for grown-ups...
You can pick any browser you want from these alternatives: IE6, IE7, IE8
Not always. You can't pick IE6 AND Vista. Many sites work well only with IE6.
Recent versions of Exchange Server work well only with IE7 or later. So in a Corporate setting with Win2K systems running IE6 for the Corporate Intranet, things get very clunky and unmanagable. Add multiple versions of SharePoint, Office, Active Directory... and pretty soon, you realise even Microsoft's products do not work well between and amnongst themselves. Unless you upgrade all of them, all at once. Which is pretty much impractical and terribly expensive.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Strange definition of "works just fine" - works fine but not everything works. "Works just about" would have been better.