But Apple is not an open source operation, any more than Microsoft is.
OS X is largely built out of FOSS: its kernel, compilers, command line, drivers, browser, etc. Apple is really shipping a heavily customized FOSS operating system. Microsoft OTOH has built almost all its core technologies themselves, using open source to fill some gaps.
Yeah, that's pretty fair. I mean, Apple isn't totally useless. I just bristle at people trying to portray Apple as this great success while open source supposedly can't get its act together.
Apple makes nicely designed high-end machines, but that's really all. Open source, in contrast, has radically changed the industry. Without open source software, there would be no OS X, no Google, and probably not even an Internet.
Apple did popularize the first GUI desktop (I know they didn't invent it).
You know, I'm not so sure. There were a number of window systems in use around that time, and the Atari ST and Amiga were quite popular. Apple is just the only one left..
And isn't the BSD kernel they based OSX on actually based on the Unix system developed privately in Bell Labs?
OS X is based on Mach, a fully open source kernel from CMU. Apple combined that with open source BSD code. They could do that because the BSD project had removed all the Bell Labs code from BSD.
The reality seems to be a tight intertwining and iterative feedback process, as far as I can tell.
I don't know about that and that's a separate discussion. What I do know is that the claims in the article aren't true.
But saying that Apple has never produced anything remotely as useful as the open source software movement doesn't make any sense. Most of MacOS X code is based on open source (as you said).
Yes, but most of that code wasn't produced by Apple.
And if you add all the stuff Apple added on top of the open source core (and that's an awful lot, have a look at developer.apple.com for information) you'll realise that this is actually more useful... No ?
Cocoa was somewhat better than other commercial or FOSS toolkits ten years ago; nowadays, it's nothing special anymore. In what way is it supposed to be "more useful"?
If I want to put together a GUI or application quickly, I use Python and Gnome; I find Objective-C and Cocoa cumbersome and limiting in comparison.
True, but the GUI layer isn't, and that's what is most important from a typical user's perspective.
So? The article claims that FOSS hasn't produced anything of value, when in fact the iPhone almost certainly wouldn't exist without FOSS.
Apple will defend that "intellectual property" to the death.
Cocoa+XCode used to be far ahead of Windows and UNIX toolkits. These days, the idea that it is Apple's secret sauce is a marketing-created fiction.
What makes Apple's UIs feel nicer is an attention to detail in Apple's OS releases. But, hey, it's a luxury brand, you pay a premium, you can expect that.
I love how you say that they've done this with an undertone of contempt
Well, geez, why might I point this out? Oh, right: we're discussing an article which attempts to portray Apple as the great innovator and FOSS as people who achieve nothing of value, when in reality, Apple's major products are built on top of large amounts of open source software. Apple probably wouldn't exist today without FOSS. All the major FOSS platforms don't depend on Apple software in any significant way.
(Just as annoying is the habit of Apple sales people I have observed to badmouth FOSS and Linux.)
Not to mention that Apple has given back an enormous amount to the open source community.
Like what? Apple has released some of their software packages in open source form, but often in such a useless state that FOSS programmers had to rewrite something equivalent from scratch. I use Ubuntu and I don't think there is any significant amount of open source software from Apple that I use day-to-day.
Apple's biggest contribution to FOSS is probably their KHTML improvements (aka Webkit), which is nice, but not exactly "enormous".
It's fine for Apple to use FOSS they are doing. However, when Apple or other people claim that they are doing all this wonderful stuff while FOSS supposedly can't get its act together, it's worth reminding everybody that Apple is mostly based on FOSS.
and the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity
Yes, just like cigarettes make you healthy and slim, alcohol makes you attractive to the opposite sex, junk food makes you popular, and Nikes turn you into a long distance runner, weight lifter, and all-around bad-boy. Branding is great, isn't it? Of course, it has nothing to do with reality.
Repeat after me, Mac users: "we're all different".
Related to #1: customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone.
Funny, I think Apple has never produced anything remotely as useful as the open source software movement, in particular given that probably the majority of the code Apple ships with OS X is derived from other people's open source projects to begin with.
This fiasco sounds like it was at least somewhat avoidable with the application of a modest amount of discipline.
Do you have the slightest idea what a hysterectomy entails?
Damage to the ureter and kidneys is a common complication for hysterectomies. This clinic at least caught it in time and looks like they are on top of it.
It's attitudes like yours that cause health care costs to spiral out of control. I'm sorry, but medicine can't fix everything, and major surgery has a significant chance of killing you.
I don't "think" another way is better--I can properly and clearly identify WHY something would be better another way. It isn't nearly as subjective as you think.
You just don't get it, do you? Decisions that are good for one user population may be bad for another. Decisions that increase usability may also increase product cost or time-to-market. Merely involving a usability expert may unacceptably delay product development.
Even if what you do weren't just above tea leaf reading (and it really isn't), usability would still be only one of many competing factors in product design and development.
A "usability expert" should at least understand that much. Maybe you should do some more reading...
I'm sorry about your wife and I hope she's going to be OK. However, medicine and surgery are not risk free: there's a good chance that you're going to come out the hospital worse than when you went in. That's because no human activity is without error. Unless there's clear negligence or malice on the part of the doctor, it's unavoidable that accidents happen.
That's not a bad idea, but people need to realize that "Secret" doesn't mean what they think it does in this case.
Although the usage has a somewhat different origin in this case, for practical purposes the Vatican archives are "secret" in the modern sense of the word as well.
The article also notes that the archive has been open to scholars since 1881, and about a thousand a year access it for study.
There is an enormous amount of material, no index, and any inconvenient material can simply be claimed not to exist. Until the archives have been cataloged, indexed, and digitized, and until those steps have been verified by independent sources without a Catholic political agenda, the archives have to be presumed to exist mainly to serve the propaganda needs of the Catholic church.
That's what makes it a message. It's a point of view.
Catholic moral relativism at its best: "it's all just a point of view". But, in fact, messages are not necessarily advocacy. There are many forms of messages that are based on logic, reason, and fact. It just happens to be that the Catholic theological messages are none of those.
Go to any Catholic church, walk up to the priest and tell him "I'm an atheist, and I want to see how and why you do things here". As long as you're not there to be an ass and disrupt the service
In different words, the priest will jump at the opportunity to try his manipulative techniques on you personally, but he'll absolutely refuse to have a rational discussion in front of the congregation.
So again, why would you think that flaming a priest's blog is going to make much of a difference?
No, but with a blog, the priest can't tailor his messages and his lies to the audience. With a blog, we can quote him and show his message for what it is.
It's their job to go forth and preach. It's their job to interact with the public.
They aren't "interacting with the public", they are preaching and carefully choosing their messages depending on the audience they are speaking to.
Do you honestly think some nasty comments at a priest's blog is somehow going to usher in a glorious new era of atheism? Seriously?
Probably not, since the priests will just attempt to suppress any dissent and delete comments they don't like.
But there's still something good when they start blogging: priests can't tailor their lies to different audiences on a blog; they can be quoted and held responsible for their statements in ways that they can't easily be when they are standing in a church and preaching to their congregations.
Nor is atheism the only alternative to Catholicism. You can be a Christian and reject the lies and corruption of the Vatican, like the protestants have. Or you can find religion without the Christian God.
Catholicism is deeply entrenched and it won't just go away. However, hopefully, through reasoned discussions, people may start to realize the errors of their ways.
The Catholic church presumes to tell everybody else that their spirituality is wrong and how immoral they are. Why shouldn't other people tell the Catholic church in no uncertain terms that Catholic spirituality is wrong and that Catholicism is immoral?
Catholics like to hide their own intolerance and hatred of others behind notions of "freedom of religion" and by presenting themselves as victims. They are so brainwashed into believing that they are "the good guys" that they find excuses for everything bad that they do.
But what matters is not what Catholics say, it's what they and their churches do. Catholics killed many of my ancestors and caused the rest to have to flee their homes and disperse all across Europe. The Catholic church burned people in my profession at the stake merely for speaking the truth about nature. Catholic Bishops and the Vatican call people like me "not fully human" and "objectively disordered". And the Catholic church lies about established, basic facts of biology to promote its own gender and sexual ideology. All the while, the Catholic church hierarchy covers up the fact that thousands of Catholic priests have been abusing hundreds of thousands of children, both through violence and sexually.
Yes, inded: "cue the Catholic bashing", because people need to speak out about the hypocrisy of the Catholic church, people need to speak about against its lies, and people need to remind the world of the crimes that the Catholic church has committed against humanity. There is no reason to forgive or forget this until the theology and moral philosophy of Catholicism has fundamentally changed, and it has not done that.
I do believe in your right to worship whatever gods or devils you choose. But I and others have the right to speak out and to criticize you for your religious preferences and choices, even if that makes you uncomfortable.
I work in the field of design (mostly designing computer-based training) and can tell you that your sentiment is more common than not. Most people never think of design or how it impacts their daily lives.
As a designer, you may come up with nice solutions to problems through intuition and experience, but nevertheless, you are not a usability expert or an engineer.
You'll start noticing poorly designed things EVERYWHERE and wonder why it wasn't made better.
And often there are good answers for why things are designed the way they are, even though a "designer" like you might have thought that another way was better.
The Linux world makes much of its community roots, but when it comes to developing the kernel of the operating system, it's less a case of 'volunteers ahoy!' and more a case of 'where's my pay?'
What does the guy think how "the community" was paying for food and housing? Open source developers have always usually had mainstream computer-related jobs and done open source development as part of their paid job. The only thing that's changed is that over the last few years, open source development has changed from a part-time activity to a full time activity for many developers and that therefore their job titles have changed as well.
The iPhone isn't really a smart phone, it's an iPod with a built in phone
Interesting point, but it doesn't change the 1% market share and 3x price. And there are plenty of MP3 and music apps on Android.
I'm not sure how much that accounts for the popularity of the iPhone. I always carry an iPod Nano for music, regardless of which phone I'm using; I never found it made much sense to use the phone for MP3.
Android is a smart phone users/geeks gadget, I don't think the overlap is that great.
Well, whatever the reason, we seem to agree there; this is not an epic Google/Apple battle.
LOL... I like how you make up stuff as you go when you say:
If it's so funny, you should have plenty of counterexamples, so prove me wrong. A company the size of Apple should have a few hundred tech reports and publications every year, a web site and program where academic groups can apply for grant funding, and a few publicly funded research grants sites where they are listed as participants. I can't find any. If you can, just provide the URLs; I'm genuinely interested.
Furthermore, the iPhone and almost all its fundamental technologies were invented elsewhere.
Same thing, if I'm wrong, it should be easy enough for you to point to specific examples and URLs.
But it may so happen that she is really good at work (in case of Bing) despite having nasty personality (she would be microsoft).
The analogy is false; it's not about one employee at a business, it's about a business and a monopoly.
In the restaurant analogy, we're talking about a restaurant (Microsoft) that has a monopoly in your town, there's no other. Most of the employees are nasty to you and their food is generally bad. Now they have one desert on the menu that's good, the apple cobbler (search engine). WIth that, they are actually trying to drive the nice, new cafe around the corner (Google) out of business as well. Does it make sense to leave your nice neighborhood cafe and start going to this restaurant for your deserts? I don't think so. You know what's going to happen: after they've driven the cafe out of business, they are going to revert to their old ways, and even their apple cobbler is going to go bad.
(Of course, I don't think Bing is actually very good.)
There's this single restaurant in town, and its employees treat me like shit because they know they are the single restaurant. Eventually, I just gave up eating out and started cooking at home.
Now they are opening a cafe. I don't think I'm going to give them my money; I keep going to the cafe that I know and like and where people have always treated me nicely.
What happened to judging products on their merits? Has Microsoft really damaged you so much that whatever they do meets so much resistance that the sheer *thought* of using a product would make you cringe?
Every single product I have ever bought from Microsoft has sucked to some degree (some more than others), so, yes, I do cringe.
I gave Bing a serious try since I don't like all my data going to Google. And? Same thing as with other Microsoft products: it sounds good in theory, it has lots of features, but it doesn't do its primary function very well.
See, people hate Microsoft not because of business strategy, they hate Microsoft because they don't like their products and Microsoft is using business strategy to force them to use those products anyway.
I dislike Microsoft a lot less since their monopoly has started crumbling and I don't have to use them anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
But Apple is not an open source operation, any more than Microsoft is.
OS X is largely built out of FOSS: its kernel, compilers, command line, drivers, browser, etc. Apple is really shipping a heavily customized FOSS operating system. Microsoft OTOH has built almost all its core technologies themselves, using open source to fill some gaps.
Yeah, that's pretty fair. I mean, Apple isn't totally useless. I just bristle at people trying to portray Apple as this great success while open source supposedly can't get its act together.
Apple makes nicely designed high-end machines, but that's really all. Open source, in contrast, has radically changed the industry. Without open source software, there would be no OS X, no Google, and probably not even an Internet.
Apple did popularize the first GUI desktop (I know they didn't invent it).
You know, I'm not so sure. There were a number of window systems in use around that time, and the Atari ST and Amiga were quite popular. Apple is just the only one left..
And isn't the BSD kernel they based OSX on actually based on the Unix system developed privately in Bell Labs?
OS X is based on Mach, a fully open source kernel from CMU. Apple combined that with open source BSD code. They could do that because the BSD project had removed all the Bell Labs code from BSD.
The reality seems to be a tight intertwining and iterative feedback process, as far as I can tell.
I don't know about that and that's a separate discussion. What I do know is that the claims in the article aren't true.
But saying that Apple has never produced anything remotely as useful as the open source software movement doesn't make any sense. Most of MacOS X code is based on open source (as you said).
Yes, but most of that code wasn't produced by Apple.
And if you add all the stuff Apple added on top of the open source core (and that's an awful lot, have a look at developer.apple.com for information) you'll realise that this is actually more useful... No ?
Cocoa was somewhat better than other commercial or FOSS toolkits ten years ago; nowadays, it's nothing special anymore. In what way is it supposed to be "more useful"?
If I want to put together a GUI or application quickly, I use Python and Gnome; I find Objective-C and Cocoa cumbersome and limiting in comparison.
True, but the GUI layer isn't, and that's what is most important from a typical user's perspective.
So? The article claims that FOSS hasn't produced anything of value, when in fact the iPhone almost certainly wouldn't exist without FOSS.
Apple will defend that "intellectual property" to the death.
Cocoa+XCode used to be far ahead of Windows and UNIX toolkits. These days, the idea that it is Apple's secret sauce is a marketing-created fiction.
What makes Apple's UIs feel nicer is an attention to detail in Apple's OS releases. But, hey, it's a luxury brand, you pay a premium, you can expect that.
I love how you say that they've done this with an undertone of contempt
Well, geez, why might I point this out? Oh, right: we're discussing an article which attempts to portray Apple as the great innovator and FOSS as people who achieve nothing of value, when in reality, Apple's major products are built on top of large amounts of open source software. Apple probably wouldn't exist today without FOSS. All the major FOSS platforms don't depend on Apple software in any significant way.
(Just as annoying is the habit of Apple sales people I have observed to badmouth FOSS and Linux.)
Not to mention that Apple has given back an enormous amount to the open source community.
Like what? Apple has released some of their software packages in open source form, but often in such a useless state that FOSS programmers had to rewrite something equivalent from scratch. I use Ubuntu and I don't think there is any significant amount of open source software from Apple that I use day-to-day.
Apple's biggest contribution to FOSS is probably their KHTML improvements (aka Webkit), which is nice, but not exactly "enormous".
It's fine for Apple to use FOSS they are doing. However, when Apple or other people claim that they are doing all this wonderful stuff while FOSS supposedly can't get its act together, it's worth reminding everybody that Apple is mostly based on FOSS.
If *only* there were a freely available OS to us on phones that wasn't from Apple - hmmm
Most of Apple's iPhone and desktop OS is FOSS anyway: the Mach kernel, BSD libraries, the gcc compiler and runtime, and tons more.
and the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity
Yes, just like cigarettes make you healthy and slim, alcohol makes you attractive to the opposite sex, junk food makes you popular, and Nikes turn you into a long distance runner, weight lifter, and all-around bad-boy. Branding is great, isn't it? Of course, it has nothing to do with reality.
Repeat after me, Mac users: "we're all different".
Related to #1: customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone.
Funny, I think Apple has never produced anything remotely as useful as the open source software movement, in particular given that probably the majority of the code Apple ships with OS X is derived from other people's open source projects to begin with.
This fiasco sounds like it was at least somewhat avoidable with the application of a modest amount of discipline.
Do you have the slightest idea what a hysterectomy entails?
Damage to the ureter and kidneys is a common complication for hysterectomies. This clinic at least caught it in time and looks like they are on top of it.
It's attitudes like yours that cause health care costs to spiral out of control. I'm sorry, but medicine can't fix everything, and major surgery has a significant chance of killing you.
I don't "think" another way is better--I can properly and clearly identify WHY something would be better another way. It isn't nearly as subjective as you think.
You just don't get it, do you? Decisions that are good for one user population may be bad for another. Decisions that increase usability may also increase product cost or time-to-market. Merely involving a usability expert may unacceptably delay product development.
Even if what you do weren't just above tea leaf reading (and it really isn't), usability would still be only one of many competing factors in product design and development.
A "usability expert" should at least understand that much. Maybe you should do some more reading...
I'm sorry about your wife and I hope she's going to be OK. However, medicine and surgery are not risk free: there's a good chance that you're going to come out the hospital worse than when you went in. That's because no human activity is without error. Unless there's clear negligence or malice on the part of the doctor, it's unavoidable that accidents happen.
That's not a bad idea, but people need to realize that "Secret" doesn't mean what they think it does in this case.
Although the usage has a somewhat different origin in this case, for practical purposes the Vatican archives are "secret" in the modern sense of the word as well.
The article also notes that the archive has been open to scholars since 1881, and about a thousand a year access it for study.
There is an enormous amount of material, no index, and any inconvenient material can simply be claimed not to exist. Until the archives have been cataloged, indexed, and digitized, and until those steps have been verified by independent sources without a Catholic political agenda, the archives have to be presumed to exist mainly to serve the propaganda needs of the Catholic church.
That's what makes it a message. It's a point of view.
Catholic moral relativism at its best: "it's all just a point of view". But, in fact, messages are not necessarily advocacy. There are many forms of messages that are based on logic, reason, and fact. It just happens to be that the Catholic theological messages are none of those.
Go to any Catholic church, walk up to the priest and tell him "I'm an atheist, and I want to see how and why you do things here". As long as you're not there to be an ass and disrupt the service
In different words, the priest will jump at the opportunity to try his manipulative techniques on you personally, but he'll absolutely refuse to have a rational discussion in front of the congregation.
So again, why would you think that flaming a priest's blog is going to make much of a difference?
No, but with a blog, the priest can't tailor his messages and his lies to the audience. With a blog, we can quote him and show his message for what it is.
It's their job to go forth and preach. It's their job to interact with the public.
They aren't "interacting with the public", they are preaching and carefully choosing their messages depending on the audience they are speaking to.
Do you honestly think some nasty comments at a priest's blog is somehow going to usher in a glorious new era of atheism? Seriously?
Probably not, since the priests will just attempt to suppress any dissent and delete comments they don't like.
But there's still something good when they start blogging: priests can't tailor their lies to different audiences on a blog; they can be quoted and held responsible for their statements in ways that they can't easily be when they are standing in a church and preaching to their congregations.
Nor is atheism the only alternative to Catholicism. You can be a Christian and reject the lies and corruption of the Vatican, like the protestants have. Or you can find religion without the Christian God.
Catholicism is deeply entrenched and it won't just go away. However, hopefully, through reasoned discussions, people may start to realize the errors of their ways.
The Catholic church presumes to tell everybody else that their spirituality is wrong and how immoral they are. Why shouldn't other people tell the Catholic church in no uncertain terms that Catholic spirituality is wrong and that Catholicism is immoral?
Catholics like to hide their own intolerance and hatred of others behind notions of "freedom of religion" and by presenting themselves as victims. They are so brainwashed into believing that they are "the good guys" that they find excuses for everything bad that they do.
But what matters is not what Catholics say, it's what they and their churches do. Catholics killed many of my ancestors and caused the rest to have to flee their homes and disperse all across Europe. The Catholic church burned people in my profession at the stake merely for speaking the truth about nature. Catholic Bishops and the Vatican call people like me "not fully human" and "objectively disordered". And the Catholic church lies about established, basic facts of biology to promote its own gender and sexual ideology. All the while, the Catholic church hierarchy covers up the fact that thousands of Catholic priests have been abusing hundreds of thousands of children, both through violence and sexually.
Yes, inded: "cue the Catholic bashing", because people need to speak out about the hypocrisy of the Catholic church, people need to speak about against its lies, and people need to remind the world of the crimes that the Catholic church has committed against humanity. There is no reason to forgive or forget this until the theology and moral philosophy of Catholicism has fundamentally changed, and it has not done that.
I do believe in your right to worship whatever gods or devils you choose. But I and others have the right to speak out and to criticize you for your religious preferences and choices, even if that makes you uncomfortable.
I work in the field of design (mostly designing computer-based training) and can tell you that your sentiment is more common than not. Most people never think of design or how it impacts their daily lives.
As a designer, you may come up with nice solutions to problems through intuition and experience, but nevertheless, you are not a usability expert or an engineer.
You'll start noticing poorly designed things EVERYWHERE and wonder why it wasn't made better.
And often there are good answers for why things are designed the way they are, even though a "designer" like you might have thought that another way was better.
The Linux world makes much of its community roots, but when it comes to developing the kernel of the operating system, it's less a case of 'volunteers ahoy!' and more a case of 'where's my pay?'
What does the guy think how "the community" was paying for food and housing? Open source developers have always usually had mainstream computer-related jobs and done open source development as part of their paid job. The only thing that's changed is that over the last few years, open source development has changed from a part-time activity to a full time activity for many developers and that therefore their job titles have changed as well.
It's primary function, as seen by it's developers, is competing with Google. It's a second matter to them whether or not it's a good search engine.
And it doesn't do the former particularly well because it doesn't do the latter particularly well.
At best, Bing is a barely credible placeholder right now for Microsoft to try their usual bundling and tying games with.
You claim that iPhone has "1%" of the smart phone market
No, I claim that iPhone has 1% of the phone market, which it does.
and that Android has more?
No, I did not. Go back and read what I wrote.
There just is no "battle" here. Google may be a threat to Apple, but Apple just isn't a threat to Google.
The iPhone isn't really a smart phone, it's an iPod with a built in phone
Interesting point, but it doesn't change the 1% market share and 3x price. And there are plenty of MP3 and music apps on Android.
I'm not sure how much that accounts for the popularity of the iPhone. I always carry an iPod Nano for music, regardless of which phone I'm using; I never found it made much sense to use the phone for MP3.
Android is a smart phone users/geeks gadget, I don't think the overlap is that great.
Well, whatever the reason, we seem to agree there; this is not an epic Google/Apple battle.
LOL... I like how you make up stuff as you go when you say:
If it's so funny, you should have plenty of counterexamples, so prove me wrong. A company the size of Apple should have a few hundred tech reports and publications every year, a web site and program where academic groups can apply for grant funding, and a few publicly funded research grants sites where they are listed as participants. I can't find any. If you can, just provide the URLs; I'm genuinely interested.
Furthermore, the iPhone and almost all its fundamental technologies were invented elsewhere.
Same thing, if I'm wrong, it should be easy enough for you to point to specific examples and URLs.
(surfslasher=jscotta44?)
Many people find that behavior useful, which is why it's the default.
There's an extension that changes that behavior and clears the search right away.
But it may so happen that she is really good at work (in case of Bing) despite having nasty personality (she would be microsoft).
The analogy is false; it's not about one employee at a business, it's about a business and a monopoly.
In the restaurant analogy, we're talking about a restaurant (Microsoft) that has a monopoly in your town, there's no other. Most of the employees are nasty to you and their food is generally bad. Now they have one desert on the menu that's good, the apple cobbler (search engine). WIth that, they are actually trying to drive the nice, new cafe around the corner (Google) out of business as well. Does it make sense to leave your nice neighborhood cafe and start going to this restaurant for your deserts? I don't think so. You know what's going to happen: after they've driven the cafe out of business, they are going to revert to their old ways, and even their apple cobbler is going to go bad.
(Of course, I don't think Bing is actually very good.)
It's more like...
There's this single restaurant in town, and its employees treat me like shit because they know they are the single restaurant. Eventually, I just gave up eating out and started cooking at home.
Now they are opening a cafe. I don't think I'm going to give them my money; I keep going to the cafe that I know and like and where people have always treated me nicely.
What happened to judging products on their merits? Has Microsoft really damaged you so much that whatever they do meets so much resistance that the sheer *thought* of using a product would make you cringe?
Every single product I have ever bought from Microsoft has sucked to some degree (some more than others), so, yes, I do cringe.
I gave Bing a serious try since I don't like all my data going to Google. And? Same thing as with other Microsoft products: it sounds good in theory, it has lots of features, but it doesn't do its primary function very well.
See, people hate Microsoft not because of business strategy, they hate Microsoft because they don't like their products and Microsoft is using business strategy to force them to use those products anyway.
I dislike Microsoft a lot less since their monopoly has started crumbling and I don't have to use them anymore.