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Why Does Everyone Hate Microsoft?
Posted by
Cliff
on Thu Dec 14, 2006 10:42 PM
from the don't-hold-back dept.
from the don't-hold-back dept.
MrSplog asks: "I'm doing a short project on Microsoft and its impact on society. A considerable part of this project has been looking into people's perceptions of Microsoft and the heavily negative bias of that perception. Since Slashdot is one of the world's forefront leaders on Microsoft hatred, I wanted to know: just why do you hate Microsoft? Please be as descriptive and as thorough as you like. Counter arguments and positive comments are also appreciated."
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I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Saying all that, I actually had a pretty good Micron PC running Win 95 that was remarkably stable. Of course upgrading it to Win98 was a unmitigated disaster. Win NT was a very stable OS, that was just cryptic to use and administer. Win2000 was pretty decent, and it almost made me switch my home system from MacOS to Win200, but like most products they have simply used their monopoly status to make the right changes very late in the game if ever. How long did it take them to adopt all characters for file names?
Where I really started getting disgusted with their business was after I saw company after company run out of business due to business practices that bordered on illegal and in some cases blatantly crossed the legal line. I always tended to prefer the MacOS, but was fairly platform agnostic (using Windows, Solaris, Linux, Irix, MacOS) for whichever task needed the appropriate platform, but with the advent of OS X, I've become a strong advocate for the Macintosh platform which brings up another issue entirely.... Microsoft has for decades now used Apple as their R&D lab. It's an obvious and well known joke, but if you are familiar with OS X, just wait until you get to play with Vista. Come on now, there are some very smart folks at Microsoft, so why can't they come up with ideas and products on their own? My take on it is that it is an efficiency issue combined with a management issue with too much oversight at the early and mid stages of the game. For instance, how many programmers are there on the Windows development team? Its in the thousands for sure, perhaps tens of thousands all told. For OS X, the number of full on programmers numbers in the hundreds. Under 300 for sure last time I checked a couple of years ago. The whole Quicktime team numbers around 30-40 whereas the Microsoft Media Player team is well into the hundreds. We could go on and on here, but to answer your question, this scientist at least does not hate Microsoft. I've just watched the company for years, purchased some of their products and have found a product from another company (Apple) that meets my needs and does not get in the way of my work the way Microsoft products tend to do.
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:5, Funny)
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Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:5, Insightful)
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One could argue this only (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Informative)
I guess you've never heard of DOSEMU [dosemu.org], a program that uses the Linux kernel call "vm86" to run 16-bit DOS programs in the vm86 mode of 386-compatible processors ? Most 16-bit DOS applications I've tried on it have worked just fine.
Or you could use DOSBox [sourceforge.net], which is a complete emulator (meaning it emulates the processor too, unlike DOSEMU). The odd DOS app that didn't work under DOSEMU works fine under DOSBox.
It's the support for Windows applications (via Wine [winehq.com]) that is less than perfect under Linux, but it is improving. Then again, it could hardly be getting worse ;).
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Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Insightful)
And the sad part is, M$ has all the vendors producing drivers SPECIFICALLY for their operating system. All they have to do is provide a stable kernel and easy/efficient module system for these drivers, and they'd be golden -- every advantage is on their side there. This opposed to Linux and *BSD, who are still more or less reverse engineering many of their drivers.
This is actually what's causing the damn trouble. Many companies who build hardware apparently can't code drivers worth shit.
Yeah, there are the certification things that MS has started giving to drivers, but often times they drivers aren't certified, and what are you supposed to do?
MS is such an absurdly large company, I don't know why the hell they can't have a 'drivers' division.
You know, in the real world, the purpose of an OS is to talk to the hardware. It's mildly ironic that MS includes all sorts of junk in an OS that doesn't belong there, but doesn't bother writing actual hardware drivers, which, you know, is something like half of the actual 'OS', with managing access to devices being the other half.
Now, OSes tend to come with a bit more than that, like shells and lots of APIs, but the real 'operating system' part is 'this is a hardware device, this is how I talk to this specific thing, this is how programs talk to me to get me to talk to it'. The fact MS is slacking on the 'this is how I talk to is' is just hilarious. It's how to write an OS without writing half the OS, I guess.
Of course, MS also doesn't include all sorts of other pieces of standard OSes, like CD and floppy imagers and image writers and image mounters, or network sniffing utilities. You know, actual hardware tools that OSes should come with. Even their text editor sucks.
They're too busy throwing in crippled applications like WordPad and Windows Movie Maker and Paintbrush. Not to mention various network clients like IE and Outlook. Almost always to target some competition.
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Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree enthusiastically. Maybe Paintbrush isn't the best app Microsoft ever wrote, but I can't imagine life without it. It is absolutely the right size for 90% of my drawing needs, especially since it now can handle GIF, JPG and PNG's in addition to BMP.
What else would I use to edit, crop and save screen shots when I'm writing documentation?Parent
Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Informative)
I've got installation media for Windows 2.03 kicking around somewhere which came with my first Microsoft mouse and it's actually ZSoft PC Paintbrush which was bundled with the mouse.
The mention of ZSoft was dropped in Windows 3.0 and apart from support for things like GIF and JPG now, the application has changed very little since Windows 2 (Well if it ain't broke...)
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Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Interesting)
Of the 118 driver modules currently loaded on my system, 100 of them are (C) Microsoft Corporation. The others are 5 for VMWare, 2 for my nVidia video card, 1 for the nVidia nForce MCP net adapter, 1 for the Realtek 650 sound, 1 for the OpenVPN virtual TAP adapter, 1 for the crappy Macromedia safedisc copyprotection driver, 2 for Daemon Tools, 1 for Process Explorer, and 4 for the cd burning software. Of the non-Microsoft drivers that are supporting real hardware, that's 4 drivers for 3 devices. There are only three devices on my system that Microsoft didn't write drivers for. If Linux were running on this system, I'd want the binary nVidia drivers for video and networking (AFAIK nForce2 networking still isn't supported in the mainline. It definitely wasn't when I built the machine).
Microsoft definitely has a drivers division.
I do agree about Microsoft fixing the wrong things most of the time in their OS, though.
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Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, or just like how Mac OS X targets people who want to use computers but don't know or care how they work.
Oh, wait -- OS X does include disk image and network-sniffing utilities! And a functional command-line, for that matter!
If OS X can do it, Microsoft has no excuse not to.
Parent
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:5, Insightful)
While we're arguing hypotheticals, I'll point out that if it were really up to Apple, IBM would have put the necessary resources into developing low-power and high-speed PowerPC chips, the lack of which being what drove Apple into the Intel transition. If there were no Microsoft, and as a result, the same level of R&D going into today's x86-derived processors were instead used to develop the PowerPC line powering Apple's presumed monopoly, then the Intel transition would not have been desirable.
You're right in that competition is a good thing; I'd be just as concerned by an Apple monopoly over the PC market as I am by the current Microsoft one. But I think the parent was saying (and I agree) that they are Microsoft's anticompetitive behaviors which earn that company such widespread disapproval.
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Re:Multiple OSes are good - monopolies are bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's (illegal) monopoly means that
- They don't have to compete on quality (The emergence of Linux has finally forced them to put some effort there).
- They can ignore community wishes (IE between the death of Netscape and emergence of Firefox is an example),
- They can force absurd prices for their software.
- They can prevent hardware manufacturers from releasing specs (that would allow Linux to build drivers)
- They can ignore bugs, and know that you're not going to the (what?) competition.
- They can do things like trying to force Israel to drop the Mac by not supporting Hebrew
- they can completely change how the internals work and just assume that people are going to scramble to support the new system (Me -> XP, and even XP-SP2)
- They'll sometimes break things just to trash their competition. The fact that it causes problems for customers is irrelevant.
- They can cause your system to self destruct if they decide (retroactively!) that your activation code wasn't so good after all.
- They can make it all but impossible for you to find a distributor that also sells competing products.
- . . . .
It's not the name Microsoft that people hate, it's the nasty things that they do in the name of ever-increasing profit and widening monopoly (while mouthing platitudes about innovation, competition and customer care) that people hate.There's nothing bad, per-se with dominance. At any given time there are likely to be a couple of dominant players. If those dominant players played fair and were dominant solely because of good products and service (which would probably also include interoperability), there would be no problem with them being dominant.
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Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:5, Insightful)
So if a technology is growing which is outside of complete control my Microsoft, they go out and purchase and terminate those companies leading the way.
Heard of OpenGL? Well Microsoft can't have a cross platform 3D tool getting developers excited. They must come up with another 3D system which will ONLY RUN ON WINDOWS.
Got 80% marketshare in handhelds( PalmOS ). Microsoft start seeing all the other dbase vendors shipping dbases clients for PalmOS so Microsoft releases MS Access lite for WindowsCE, which nobodies heard of. Fast forward 10 years and you find that Microsoft has lost over $8 billion on WindowsCE just to dominate the handheld market. Ie, they bought their way into the market with $10's of billions over about 10 years.
This guy wants to know why people hate Microsoft? He/she should look at how Microsoft pretends to "compete" in the market. Hint, they don't compete and do EVERYTHING they can legally and sometimes illegally to stop the reall innovators from making their product sucessful.
And lets not even go into how they steal other companies IP and then after 5-10 years when the company has no more customers and exists only as an owner and a lawyer, they pay out a few million in a "settlement".
IMO, Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, and the rest of the crew are snake oil salesmen. They use Microsoft to crush anybody and everybody they decide is a threat to the money train called the Microsoft Windows monopoly.
You are very lucky to even hear of Microsoft doing a Mac version of a product they've purchased. Given how they hate that Apple is making a sucess out of the iPod, I wouldn't doubt that EVERY Microsoft product for the Apple is heading for the chopping block. IMO
LoB
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Re:I love being screwed over (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is possibly the worst solution I could imagine to the problem of complex software that is intended for normal users. Can you point to any examples of general-use software (open or closed source) that have successfully implemented a basic/intermediate/advanced toggle switch for its main interface? This idea gets brought up frequently by those with technical experience but who don't design software interfaces for a living (or in their free time, as the case may be). It's an awful idea that only serves to promote the notion that the more complex functionality of the software should be locked away from all but the lords of technology, unavailable to the unwashed masses who are just too unskilled to touch the powerful resources of truly great software.
The reason this idea is bad is that it's impossible to define the subset of software functionality that will never be used by the users you brand as basic or intermediate. While everyone needs the core functionality (for a word processor, things like open, save, copy, paste, print), a large number of basic users need to regularly use functionality you might logically put in the intermediate bucket (headers and footers, tables of contents, tab stops, tables), and a not insignificant number of basic and intermediate users occasionally need the most complex features (mail merge, document comparisons, tracking, and versioning).
By removing these features from the software interface when in intermediate or advanced mode, you're not solving the problem at all. You're postponing and worsening it. As soon as Grandma Mae wants to send out her Christmas letters, or Nephew Ted wants to type out his term paper, you have to preface all your instructions with "turn on advanced mode" at which point they're presented with the mind-boggling array of features that is ostensibly causing the problem in the first place. All of the sudden, the software is unfamiliar again; it's like a whole new program. One can get to insert picture or number pages all right, but where the heck did copy and paste go? And you're back to square one, having accomplished nothing but turned a single software program into three.
If complex software is to be used by inexperienced users, we as software designers must first accept the fact that the users are neither dim-witted nor incapable of understanding complexity. They are simply not intimately familiar with its every nook and cranny. The duty of the software designer is to make complex functionality usable. Be smart about context: only display options that are relevant to the situation. Choose smart defaults and explicitly highlight common configurations. Help shouldn't be an afterthought or even solely contained in an external help file; the software be clear what will be the result of a particular choice. Account for bumbling or exploring users and mistakes: make every action reversible. Error messages should be descriptive and actionable, suggesting probable resolutions.
We have so far to go in software design. Let's not simply route around hard problems, dismissing common users with a switch. Our goal should be to make software accessible to everyone. This is often a very difficult task to design and implement effectively. Accept that this difficulty in software development will always exist, but will pay off many times over in the form of productive and satisfied users. But don't simply turn away common everyday users, they by definition greatly outnumber the skilled technicians, and they deserve the absolute best experience software can deliver.
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Three Words (Score:5, Insightful)
Criticism of Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I think most of the slimy stuff is due to business decisions. I know a lot of people that work there, and they are generally hard working, intelligent people that sincerely want to impact people's lives for the better, and see Microsoft's large market share as a way to actually make a difference. If the devs were in charge, or if they had scrupulous and competent businessmen, it would be a much different company. The fish rots from the head.
The recent change in leadership is promising, but I'm definitely in the "wait and see" camp. You know, the "buy a mac while I wait and see" camp. Hey, Disney is turning around. It could happen.
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Thats a symptom (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Three Words (Score:5, Informative)
Why do people hate Microsoft? In a word: Greed. Microsoft is consumed by a rampant, unrepentant, no-holds-barred corporate ravenousness for consumer dollars. At least this is how it looks to individual consumers, small businesses, and even most other large enterprises.
Some examples:
- Microsoft was among the first major, mainstream software publishers to charge paying customers for technical support on legally-owned Microsoft products.
- Microsoft was one of the first major, mainstream software companies to increase upgrade fees from what was a standard 20% of the original software price to what is now 50%, if you are allowed to upgrade at all.
- Microsoft was the first major, mainstream software company to deny upgrades to customers who don't pre-pay the 50% upgrade fee up-front when the original software purchase is made, with no refund if an upgrade isn't released within two years.
- Microsoft bemoans the cost of software piracy, but each time Microsoft has implemented technology to reduce piracy, it has doubled the price of the better protected software.
- Microsoft adds features to its software that puts competitors out of business, then removes those features and sells them as add-ons or upgraded versions.
- Microsoft talks reduced enterprise TCO benefits on the one hand while making each new release significantly more difficult to deploy, maintain and support.
- Microsoft claims that it's not predatory or monopolistic, while using its overwhelmingly dominant position in the OS market to drive out competitors to its application and development tools marketplaces.
- And yes, Embrace, Extend and Exterminate.
I could give more specifics, but I'm under non-disclosure.Parent
Re:Three Words (Score:5, Informative)
I am a live dinosaur. I have owned and used every MS OS version since MS-DOS 2.1. I beta tested Windows 1.0.
Ok, granted it is not doubling every time, but this IS Slashdot, and I am allowed poetic license.
How about Microsoft Windows Antivirus: Included free in 3.0/3.1 versions, removed from 3.11. Now sold as Microsoft OneCare. How about a calendar application, which later was integrated with an Email application and became the first version of MS-Outlook in Windows 3.11, removed from Windows 98, and now sold separately? How about backup, which has been in and out in so many different ways that I lost track?
Well, it's a really old and broad non-disclosure.Parent
Spyware (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spyware (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the problem. Microsoft has conditioned you to expect suffering. This is unacceptable.
If you take a step back and read what you have written, you probably put forth the most compelling argument AGAINST Microsoft - that they have lowered the collective standards of computing to the point where people think its OK to get viruses and spyware and think its just 'part of using a PC.' Which, of course, it isn't, unless you happen to be using Windows.
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There's no reason to hate Microsoft anymore. (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides which, they'll be gone in 10 years anyways. That's not a rimshot. Shit, it's not even an original thought. It's just the way things are going.
Re:There's no reason to hate Microsoft anymore. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that makes about as much sense as saying "murderes leave a hell of a mess - that's what murderers do. So yeah, no reason to hate OJ Simpson anymore, we know what he is."
It must have escaped my attention when it became the case that the simple realization that a person or company has committed a crime somehow excuses it.
Microsoft is a convicted monopoly. There is no more reason to hate them required. They will always be a convicted monopolist; you don't somehow get un-convicted after a couple of years. The penalties they had to accept (at least in this country) may have been little more than a slap on the wrist... but that doesn't change what they are. And it's something they only share with a few other companies in the history of this country.
I mean, why hate Enron? Why hate the tobacco industry? Why hate any company?
When it's not just your opinion that they've hurt people, but when it's in fact been proven that they hurt people, then I'd say that's a pretty good reason.
(That doesn't mean I hate Bill Gates; I think he's done a lot of good things. But he has not surrounded himself with the most scrupulous people, and he himself has not always acted scrupulously in business.)
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Lack of humility? NIH? (Score:5, Interesting)
When NT was first announced, I thought it was the coolest thing since bottled beer. The protected mode subsystems looked like a way to consolidate the APIs of multiple systems. As smoebody who'd already programmed Unix, PDP-11 (RSX), VAX-VMS, MVS, Univac, CDC, etc in the years prior, I thought NT was going to totally rock. It had the potential to subsume everything around it.
Little by little, the OS/2 compatibility evaporated, X-Windows was declared "brain dead", it went beyond embrace and extend, it became Microsoft's way or the highway.
I still wonder - if MS had supported POSIX / UNIX APIs in a protected mode subsystem, would Linux have really "happened"?
Alan.
Duh (Score:5, Funny)
2 Reasons (Score:5, Funny)
B) They have way more money than me.
Either one of those is reason enough for me to hate them.
Nobody likes a bully... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody likes a bully.
Not complete hatred (Score:5, Insightful)
It is frustrating knowing that better products exist that will never get a chance because of their hegemony.
However, I do really like certain Microsoft products. I think Defender is a great idea, perhaps a few years late in the game. MS Office is a great product. Their development tools are good.
And Microsoft has become considerably less evil in recent years, but they have no regards for standards and make life unduly difficult for a great deal of people. Sometimes it doesn't even serve a financial purpose.
Look at their history with Sun and Java. Microsoft clearly has no respect for other's rights or licenses. And they want the internet to be something proprietary that they control, again even if it costs them money, and they don't gain anything from it. They just want to control things. By pushing for browser-specific tags, and refusing to conform to web standards, every webmaster on the planet is put out to design around both standards and Microsoft.
Does Microsoft make money of IE? No. They give it away for free, while throwing butt-loads of money developing it. So why continue to spend money fucking the entire internet over? Because they are bullies who like to remain the king of every hill they can find, even if it means forcing customers into inferior products.
That's why.
Simple (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft's goal is to own and control everything on my computer, in the server room, eventually perhaps in my lounge room and anywhere else they can imagine. And they try to keep it that way by deliberately avoiding existing open standards and interoperability with existing applications. They adopt new standards with reluctance, and even then they break them.
Because Microsoft is a Corporate Criminal (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft was let off the legal hook by a fortunate change in administrations - more like a fortunate failure to honor the democratic will of the people.
Microsoft spends billions of dollars around the world lobbying for initiatives that restrict and suppress open standards and free software, guaranteeing expansion of its monopoly worldwide and into emerging and developing markets.
Bill Gates may be attempting to use his money to make a positive impact in this world in order to whitewash his legacy in his old age, but had governments and businesses and people invested in open standards and free software instead of the monopolist's products, we would still have Bill's money in our collective pockets, developing our economies, educating our children, and feeding our families.
The insecurities of an aging robber baron are little consolation for the great human and natural resources he has squandered through ruthless malice, contempt for law, personal aggrandizement, and cronyism.
How'd I do?
Opposition is misinterpreted as hatred (Score:5, Insightful)
I *oppose* Microsoft because they have a monopoly position in markets with high barriers to entry. In this situation, competition suffers, and without competition we get stagnation. It is a good thing for me to spend my efforts towards increasing competition rather than decreasing it, which generally requires opposing Microsoft.
How we arrived at this situation is not very relevant. It's partly Microsoft's doing, partly not. The computer industry suffers from structural network effects that drive the marketplace towards monopolies; that's not Microsoft's fault. But Microsoft certainly did (and does) many ethical and unethical things to reach and maintain its position.
People tend to think that if you oppose Microsoft, you must also hate them, but it's not so.
Stagnation (Score:5, Insightful)
-stagnation: Microsoft is responsible for a stagnation of innovation on the pc. Ranging from the _very_ late adoption of technologies (example: USB) to the complete ignorance of standards(html, css), they have hurt innovation
-interoperability/lock-in: the small changes in the SMB-protocol from version to version are jsut there to block interoperability. same goes for NTFS.
-sucky products: none of their releases are good. Almost every single product they have released begins to get useful a year after the release, when the most annoying bugs have been fixed. I could tolerate that with a small software-hut which _needs_ the money NOW, but Microsoft as enough money to wait till the product is really ready for the market.
-sucky products/bloat: I don't think that luna should eat away 140Mb of my RAM. I don't think that Word 2004 offers enough new features to warrant a tenfold increase of RAM-usage compared to Word 97
-lies: Microsoft lies. See their FUD about linux. See what the "great business deals" and "alliances" have gotten the companies Microsoft partnered with: every single company that worked with Microsoft lost.
-Content industry's bitch: DRM in every format, downscaling of videos, etc. _I_ am the customer, not the MPAA.
-arrogant CEO: Balmer must go.
-arrogant company: A company that want's to crush and kill everybody else is mad. Competition yes, killing for the killing's sake: NO.
First off, it's not 'hate'... (Score:5, Interesting)
...It's contempt. 8^)
Okay, I jest. There are number of very good reasons the like Microsoft - their office automation products do make life easier - but it's just not enough for me. The fundamental problems are threefold:
There's no way to guarantee my work. (This is actually a complaint about proprietary software in general, but Microsoft is the worst about this.) On two or three significant occasions, I have been completely burned after commitments that I made to a client based on technical assurances I'd received that proved to be false. I've been forced into unsustainable situations because there was a huge gap between what the product promised to do and what it actually did. Dealing with the last 20% of any task is difficult at the best of times, but the number of times on Windows that I've been forced to accept that things are never going to run as designed because of shortcomings in the technology... they're too many to count.
Ultimately, the only way I could maintain my professional reputation (and my pride) was to walk away from the Microsoft Windows platform completely and to live with Linux and FOSS. It's not that it's better, per se, but at least I can make things work exactly as they're designed, without being completely at the mercy of someone else's market research and development cycle. In the worst case scenario, I can always keep a client happy by paying someone to provide a patch expressly for them. I may lose my shirt on that contract, but I'll never have a pissed-off client, and in my business, that's golden.
They're holding us back. I did a back-of-the-napkin calculation the other day, to see how much time I'd spent that week dealing with Windows' shortcomings instead of actually improving our systems. It was a fairly direct equation, because I was working on developing a really cool network monitoring toolkit that week. Every hour I spent at someone else's desk cleaning up crap delayed the arrival of this very useful tool by an hour. I calculated that I work 30% slower than I could do if I didn't have to deal with spyware, trojans, spambots etc.
That's insane. Seriously. People who don't know anything besides Microsoft will tell you that exploits happen to everyone, that if it wasn't MS, it would be someone else. But it just ain't so. Today's Word exploit is stunning evidence that Microsoft practices... whatever the opposite of security is. No I don't mean 'insecure'; they're apps are that, but their design is more like 'anti-secure'. I mean, who in their right mind stores pointers for memory move operations in a word processing file?
They are trying to break the Internet. The first points disappointed me, as a geek. But this point makes me angry. For Microsoft, dominance is not sufficient. They don't play to win; they play to destroy. And the tactics they use are bad for everyone. They oppose open systems, protocols - anything that makes it easier for people to share. This selfishness of spirit is manifest in every aspect of their business, and it impacts directly on my ability to do my job.
I don't mind having to explain the relative merits of a FOSS solution to an MS-only one. But when I have to respond to lies that are spread about my stock in trade, I get upset. When I spend more time countering FUD than actually talking tech, I get upset.
This is not competition. This is the opposite. It's playing dirty. It's cheating, and I'm tired of it.
Watcom - for example (Score:5, Insightful)
"Somehow," the new linker had all sorts of bugs in its handling of COFF but handled the proprietary format just fine. EVERYONE writing windows drivers had to switch. Don't forget that writing drivers usually requires a lot of compiler pragmas that have to be redone to port from one compiler to another.
Now, perhaps this was a mistake rather than an abuse...
1. Up to that date, even Microsoft had been using the Watcom compiler. (You don't really think they wrote all their drivers in assembly)
2. The choice to make the old VxD format inoperable in the new systems was totally elective and synchronized to their theft of the compiler market. In fact, for a few product releases, we actually had a Watcom-based driver with 90% of the code and a "proxy" built with the Microsoft compiler just to trick the system into allowing it to work.
This is one of many many stories where Microsoft has used their dominance to bully their way into a business, notwithstanding the competitors who were cleaning their clocks on a previously level playing field. They did this to the detriment of their customers for sure as well as to the people that had built a legitimate business with a superior product.
Because they put profit before quality.... (Score:5, Interesting)
For years now that company has gotten away with some of the most slapped together, rushed and verbose code on the planet. (Some VERY good code too, it's not all bad) They flat out abuse us, and take advantage of an uneducated market.
What really started it for me was back in 1996. I was building a website for my company at the time. I was "instructed" to put 3 features on the site that was ONLY supported by IE and not by Netscape. Else risk our M$ relationship, which was critical to us (video cards company).
I was so upset. Not, "only use features support by both" but they must NOT work in Netscape. I was beside myself.
Still bothers me
Groklaw Has Tons of Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
This article [groklaw.net] and many others on Groklaw might give you a clue. Microsoft has:
- Destroyed Netscape and BEoS.
- Bribed government officials in India and other countries to use their operating system.
- Funded SCO's litigation against IBM and Linux in general.
- Bribed Novell into betraying the Linux community.
- Forced entire school systems to audit their computers and pay "non-compliance" fines.
- Profited off of Linux and Mac installations without paying royalties by forcing a per computer "tax" on all Licencing 6 customers.
- Slowed down the Internet with their virus ridden software.
- Made it impossible for me to buy the laptop I choose without paying them, even if I do not use their software. (The guy at the store laughed at me when I asked if I could just get the hardware.)
- Supported software patent legislation in Europe.
- Created the most DRM restricted operating system in existence with plans to extend the DRM to MY hardware and encrypt MY information on MY hard drive and give control of all that to someone else (read: Hollywood).
. . . and those are just what I can think of off the top of my head. I am sure I missed more than half, and no, I do not have time to provide links to all of those. You are on your own.Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Proprietary software is not transparent. It is therefore intrinsically less trustworthy than open source.
2) Using MS tends to lead to dependance on MS.
3) MS's business practices suggest they in particular are not trustowrthy, and more likely to exploit dependence on them to my detriment.
4) I resent the fact that their software is bundled by everyone - I want to be able to walk into a shop and have a choice of PCs with different OSes installed.
5) I have found most of their software to suck (with the exception of Excel which is very good) and the OS hard to administer (lack of a single auto update mechanism for all, or almost all, my software in particular).
6) Their security track record, and their other shortcoming, sugggests that their attitude to theis custoers is "the sucks will buy anythings".
here's an analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that, in a nutshell is why many people don't like Microsoft and why they are looking for alternatives. It's also why many other people don't mind Microsoft; they don't know anything else.
Why I dislike Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
EULA: I may have seen a EULA or two before Microsoft came on the scene but Microsoft pretty much standardized the EULA and lead the entire industry towards using them all of the time. I do not respect EULAs at all. The software is mine once I purchase it and they have no control over what I do with it afterwards.
Reliability: While their operating systems have greatly improved over time, even XP64 (their most stable OS yet) has crashed on me a couple of times. Linux on the same hardware (dual boot laptop) has never crashed. MS Access crashes on me all of the time without error messages.
Performance: I have 2 gigs of ram on my laptops. Why do I need to have 200 megs swapped out? Why does a newly loading program need to write out to swap as it is loading? Since the first version of windows, there has been a starfield screensaver. When it runs, every few seconds or so, you can see it hiccup. All of the stars stop momentarily. What is going on that prevents the computer from running so smoothly even decades later with incredibly more powerful processors?
Control: This a a big one. Why can't I easily turn off the netbios port on my home computer? Why does my computer fail to function without an externally listening RPC port? It is clear that the operating system was designed so that someone other than the person sitting at the keyboard would be in control of the computer. Why can't I tell my computer to stop talking to microsoft.com all of the time? Why are there a dozen ways to start a program running with most of those ways not being easily accessible to me? I own the computer and I own the software. Microsoft only owns the rights to copy it. Stop changing how my computer works when I am supposedly "patching" against vulnerabilities. I can no longer get patches from Microsoft because I know for a fact that Microsoft will change the way my computer works, possibly even shutting it down.
Security: Microsoft sees security as an added cost and therefore will never produce secure software. Microsoft does not even seem to understand security at all. How does clicking on that godawful popup thing in Vista increase security at all? Applications should only be able to write to their own directories and nowhere else. There should not be a need to grant privileges all the time to every program.
Quality: Portions of Microsofts software are written really well. All of those portions seem to be put together in a crappy manner.
Bleh, never mind. This is getting way to long and drawn out. Microsoft sucks and there is no hope for them. They have billions of dollars in reinforcement for their bad behaviours.
strike
Re:If everybody truely hated microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate Microsoft's products (except Project), their business practices, their monopoly, their DRM, their lack of ethics, their EULA which forces you to give up your freedom of speech, their proprietary file formats, their Microsoft Word specifically, and perhaps more reasons.
Regular computer users hate Microsoft for making them vulnerable to spyware, spam, viruses, being pwned, and so on.
Business users hate Microsoft for locking them in, for the BSA license compliance audits, the security holes, the endless patch/upgrade cycle, the high maintenance costs of their applications (like extensive downtime when machines need to be rebuilt due to some software failure).
Vendors hate Microsoft for releasing loss-leader products designed to kill the market (think Netscape, Windows Media, and soon antivirus products, BeOS) until Microsoft is the only one left standing.
Investors hate Microsoft (now) because their share price has nowhere to go but down (MSFT will not be able to continue growth unless they can find a new market to be in).
Music fans hate Microsoft for releasing the terminally broken Zune - and inventing the concept of squirting music files to your friends (3 plays or 3 days!);
Developing countries hate Microsoft for raping their economies (to the extent that the software isn't just pirated) because the funds flow to the USA. In many of these countries there's a visible shift towards open source and open standards.
I expect even Microsoft fanbois hate them for some reason, although I'm so different from the typical Microsoft fanboi that I can barely guess why, perhaps they got excited about some feature Microsoft trumpeted would be available in Vista (some feature so new and powerful that it will blow away the competition, like the advanced WINfs file system or the virtual folders) and then broke their promise before release date. I'm sure the fanbois hate when that happens.
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Re:Who did better? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyways, the whole point of this is that claiming that Windows is better because hardware manufacturers write drivers just for them is a pretty stupid statement.
Short story that always makes me smile: my non-geeky sister (Ubuntu user - I take care of her computer) came back from the first day of her first grown-up job (for a big software company, btw). What were her first words? "Windows sucks". I know quite a few non-geeks who think Linux is ready for them (just not my mom - freecell's clone apparently is worse).
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OpenOffice isn't the best alternative to MS Office (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenOffice.org isn't the best alternative to MS Office. It's the most similar alternative.
The alternative to MS Office is a whole bunch of different programs, depending on what you want to do. Scientific papers? LaTeX. Newsletters? Scribus, PageMaker, etc. Ordinary business documents? Wordperfect. Photo editing? Photoshop. The list goes on.
As for this statement:
I'm totally amazed that you have the audacity to say that, in reference to Windows, here. One of people's biggest complaints about Windows has been that you can never be sure that it'll work, even if it did before.
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Re:My .02 cents (Score:5, Interesting)
Once upon a time I developed a proprietary solution to connect up com objects to a j2ee server, guess what happens, I get a call from a microsoft goon one day trying to buy full rights to the
code...why? Not because they wanted to use it but because they wanted to bury it.
How about foxpro? oops they bought that out and buried it, best and fastest desktop database ever
made.
How about visual studio, pretty nice tool but if you use it long enough you will start to find the
artifical walls put up to drive you further to their platform. Easy stuff is easy in visual studio, soon as you want to push the edge you run into some bug, or artificial wall put in your way.
Nope, best thing I ever did is remove them from my personal and professional life.
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I wasn't going to post in this "discussion"... (Score:5, Insightful)
However, you're such a blatant appologist that I have to say something.
A corporation is called a "corporation" - and has been "incorporated" - because it has been "given a body" under the law to operate on behalf of a group of persons, and has certain rights AND RESPONSIBILITIES, just as any member of society.
The idea that a company, or its officiers, should put fiduciary responsibility on a pedestal, far above any other responsibilities to the society that permitted its incorporatinon, and on whose sufferance its continued existance depends, is relatively recent. Adherence to a specific duty above all other duties or considerations is the moral equivalent of the "Nuremberg Defense".
If a person can sell their soul, and if a corporation is a person under the law, then surely there are also many recent examples of corporations selling their souls.
-- Terry
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