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Why Does Everyone Hate Microsoft?

Posted by Cliff on Thu Dec 14, 2006 11:42 PM
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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  • by BWJones (18351) * on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:43PM (#17249216) Homepage Journal
    Oh, I don't *hate* Microsoft. In fact, I have friends who work there and have made money off of Microsoft stock. I still use Word (although Pages is coming on strong and if I could get EndNote compatibility, I'd switch entirely) and Excel and root for the company on occasion. Where I object to Microsoft is in their shoddy products. Almost every product I've used of theirs that came out at version 1.0 has royally sucked. Their whole concept of bringing products to market is date/deadline driven rather than quality or product driven, much less consumer driven. Classic cases of abysmal products were Windows v1-3, Win-98 and ME, the Zune, Bob, that first tablets and the ultra portable systems I've previewed (error messages that were too big for the display for instance), and of course their always changing interface standards and poor security issues.

    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.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:54PM (#17249376)

      Oh, I don't *hate* Microsoft. In fact, I have friends who work there and have made money off of Microsoft stock.
      Big karma hit incoming, ouch!
    • by arifirefox (1031488) on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:55PM (#17249380) Homepage
      one could argue Microsoft products are shoddy because they support a mind blowing number of hardware configurations. Apple's job is much easier...but do you want to be restricted in what kind of computer you want? If it was up to Apple, they would be still on slow powerpc chips but it was the competition in the PC world that finally made them see the light. And you have to thank Microsoft for at least part of that.
      • by Smeagel (682550) on Friday December 15 2006, @12:11AM (#17249608)
        if several other OS's didn't exist which run perfectly fine on tons of hardware (*BSD and Linux). 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.
      • by Niten (201835) on Friday December 15 2006, @12:13AM (#17249640) Homepage
        If it was up to Apple, they would be still on slow powerpc chips but it was the competition in the PC world that finally made them see the light.

        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.

      • by BWJones (18351) * on Friday December 15 2006, @12:21AM (#17249760) Homepage Journal
        Perfect example... I had a friend at a little company called Bungie. Bungie was developing this really cool little application called Halo that they were planning on releasing for MacOS, Linux and Windows. Microsoft came along, made them an offer they could not refuse and they bought the company so Halo could be a "halo" game for the Xbox platform. This of course meant that all development of Halo for the Macintosh and Linux were cancelled and Windows development was significantly delayed. It was almost a couple of years before I was asked to help with the development of the Macintosh port of Halo. So, I and many, many other users of the Macintosh and Linux (and Windows for that matter) were negatively impacted by this very common business practice of Microsoft.

  • Three Words (Score:5, Insightful)

    by davecarlotub (835831) * on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:44PM (#17249224) Journal
    • by tfinniga (555989) on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:58PM (#17249428)
      Another useful wikipedia article is Criticism of Microsoft [wikipedia.org].

      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.
    • Thats a symptom (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Catskul (323619) * <andy.somervilleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:59PM (#17249436) Homepage
      Embrace, extend and extinguish, is only a symptom of the real issue. The real issue is that Microsoft fails to subscribe the culture that most geeks subscribe to which is simply: Technical freedom. We want to be able to do whatever we want with technology, and we dont want anyone getting in our way. Microsoft is constantly getting in the the way of technical freedom as it tries to bully its way into being important instead of innovating its way into importance... Microsoft refuses to be in a support role and wants to be the center of the technical world regardless of technical merit. That getting in the way and self centered attitude is the reason everyone *I* know hates Microsoft.
    • Re:Three Words (Score:5, Informative)

      by EtherMonkey (705611) on Friday December 15 2006, @12:26AM (#17249818)

      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.
  • Spyware (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wheatwilliams (605974) on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:46PM (#17249260) Homepage
    Tieing the web browser to the operating system and creating Active X controls, and then putting no security on them, ushered in the era of spyware and caused tremendous suffering for users and the tech support people scrambling to try to stamp out the spyware.
      • Re:Spyware (Score:5, Insightful)

        by thedbp (443047) on Friday December 15 2006, @12:02AM (#17249476)
        >Nor have I experienced any tremendous suffering (beyond what is expected with PC use)

        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.
  • Before the DOJ case we all used to wonder why they produced such poor quality software at such high prices. In fact, we all felt kinda pissed off and betrayed by this. Then the anti-trust litigation put it all into perspective. No mystery anymore, that is, so long as you have even a basic understanding of microeconomics. Monopolies produce poor quality products at high prices - that's what monopolies do. So yeah, no reason to hate Microsoft anymore, we know what they are. Of course, a number of people are still pissed at Microsoft for their abuse of their monopoly, that's fine. But all those people who are pissed off at the government for handing Microsoft this monopoly they have, well, go be pissed off at the government.

    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.
    • Monopolies produce poor quality products at high prices - that's what monopolies do. So yeah, no reason to hate Microsoft anymore, we know what they are.

      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.)
  • by bunyip (17018) on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:53PM (#17249342)
    Here's an example...

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:53PM (#17249358)
    Clippy.
  • 2 Reasons (Score:5, Funny)

    by Marty200 (170963) on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:54PM (#17249372)
    A) Because the products aren't that good... They are often buggy and insecure,

    B) They have way more money than me.

    Either one of those is reason enough for me to hate them.
  • by mustard (23354) * on Thursday December 14 2006, @11:59PM (#17249442)
    MS conducts themselves as a bully.

    Nobody likes a bully.

  • by Enderandrew (866215) <enderandrew&gmail,com> on Friday December 15 2006, @12:00AM (#17249450) Homepage Journal
    They became a giant by stealing other people's ideas, establishing a status quo of mediocrity, and squashed innovation.

    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)

    by complete loony (663508) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .namekaL.ymereJ.> on Friday December 15 2006, @12:01AM (#17249470)
    It's MY Computer. It's MY Data.

    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.

  • by dircha (893383) on Friday December 15 2006, @12:08AM (#17249576)
    Microsoft is a convicted illegal monopolist.

    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?
  • by roca (43122) on Friday December 15 2006, @12:13AM (#17249636) Homepage
    I don't hate Microsoft. I think their products are often very good, given that software from any vendor tends to suck in various ways.

    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)

    Basically, my "hatred" (*hate* is such a strong word... i would prefer disgust) stems from several different things:

    -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.
  • by grcumb (781340) on Friday December 15 2006, @12:18AM (#17249726) Homepage Journal

    ...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.

    • by elronxenu (117773) on Friday December 15 2006, @12:36AM (#17249934) Homepage
      No, I think everybody hates microsoft at some level.

      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.