Why Does Everyone Hate Microsoft? 1540
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."
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.
Re:I just want to say... (Score:1, Informative)
I just submitted the following Ask Slashdot:
Come on, everybody, go for it. I'm sure you've got hundreds of similar questions you'd like to ask.
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:5, Informative)
Why I hate microsoft, let me count the hours... (Score:3, Informative)
* The six days in a row in 1997/1998 I had to battle hackers that had figured out how to reboot our windows nt 5.1 server from the net (firewalls weren't what they are today).
* The countless weeks I lost because of Exchange server disk becoming full;
* For exchange sucking such major ass ( before version 6.0) and failing when a disk filled up
* The countless hours I lost when SSL suddenly stopped working in NT one day,
* The unbearable and unthinkable number of times I've had to re-install windows when it became corrupt,
* The countless hours at christmas, thanksgiving and every other trip home I had to spend on the number of spyware and viri I've had to remove on my parent's computers (Because they have an app they need that needs activex)
And while I'm at it...
* Because of ActiveX and other closed systems,
* Because every OS upgrade requires new hardware, unlike Mac OS where ever OS Upgrade runs FASTER on older hardware than the old OS
And speaking of OS...
* Because of the registry, fuck the registry and fuck all the fucking registry hacks I've ever had to do,
* Because of the way they code their apps assembly line style in Redmond,
* Because of Bill Gates, and his hate of everything open and open source.
Thank you, you bastard troll for making me type this.
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.Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I've been using Microsoft products for the last 15 years, and for the last three years I've been working for a company that does support for small- to medium-sized businesses that use Microsoft products. At my office we use a mix of Windows and Linux and at home there are Windows, Mac, and Linux boxes under my desk. I have issues with all of them, to be sure, but here's my Microsoft litany:
Now, a list of what I like about Microsoft products:
I could probably go on all night but I've had a few drinks and need to crash.
Welcome to my world.
k.
Bully Tactics (Score:2, Informative)
It's their bully tactics. They beat Netscape by employing their monopoly to crush the competition. They violated Stac Inc.'s intellectual property with DblSpace and used their vast reserves to cash to keep from having to make it right. They bought Bungie and delayed the release of Halo for the Mac and Windows platforms just to have an XBox only app at launch. WGA. Software "activation".
What really burns me up is that after 20 years of Microsoft's horrible behavior, we actually have stupid assholes talking about making Bill Gates President of the USA.
LK
Re:Spyware (Score:3, Informative)
Every time I see stuff like this it makes me sigh.
Yes occasionally you may have a problem with X, and your chosen GUI, this is generally either hardware that isn't working properly or you have some obscure hardware.
I can not give one example where I have been unable to use *any* graphics card / monitor combo (and I have had some really old / generic kit running purely to play with, and the more usual modern kit for day to day use) with *any* Linux flavour I chose (primarily Debian these days, but also occasionally SUSE or Red Hat).
Moreover I have never come across an single situation where using a VESA driver didn't work, laptops included.
This is exactly the same situation as with windows (I have had problems with windows refusing to accept what I thought was a valid driver for an old MGI card, and was stuck in 640x480 at 256colors...) Basically for most people it just works, for some people you may have to find a driver (Windows or Linux) and for some people you will end up with a bodge and a generic driver (again Windows and Linux?.
Even more interestingly I have found that multi monitor support in Linux - especially with differing graphics cards (i.e. 3 different cards for three different monitors in this case) is far far better than that offered in Windows
Now in the interests of helping you with your opinion of Linux, I would be honoured to assist you with your graphical problem, feel free to post any relevant info here (or email me (the address is with the post obfusticated but I'm sure you'll get it) and I will take a look and see if I cant prevail where your guys failed. A copy of your X server log, X config file and the output of lspci -X (if it is a PCI card) would help, as would any version info for your kernel and X server. a quick fix - depending on your setup would be to run X -configure as root.
Oh and no one is forcing you to run Gentoo :) it does exactly what you want it to, but I would only ever use it in very specific roles
Re:Forced & UNWANTED "upgrades" (Score:3, Informative)
Besides, your Windows 98SE systems will still run until the hardware gives out. You'll probably find that eventually you won't be able to find new software for it, and you might find that evetually you won't be able to put it on a public network. But it'll still work. Though I do see the potential for Microsoft to actually try to kill off Windows XP and later versions by simply refusing to activate it at some point in the future.
Re:My .02 cents (Score:4, Informative)
A guy called JarJarJedi comes to slashdot and bitches about Apple and "Linix", while at the same time glorifying Microsoft's product which he thinks is as good as should be expected, while at the same time he looks at those (Win) computers and sees how often they crash, how virus prone they are and he gets a +4 insightful?
WTF mods?
Asleep at the wheel?
On the offchance that I am wrong, I would then like to say Issa for onessa welcomessa our bizarro-worldssa overlordssa!
And, to stay on the topic, I think tech help "hates" MS because we get stuck fixing their mistakes on our weekends, afterhours and so on. All while the bosses are superhappy about getting the next round of MS licenses for cheap, and delegating the problems to the tech help. This of course leaves nothing for tech help to do but to constantly put out fires while listening to bitchy users.
Sure, script kiddies and CS players of east europe LOOOOVE their microsoft, but they don't have to support 100s of bitchy users whose machines are running slow, because microsoft decided to leave the OS completely vulnerable to spyware.
But I rant. I work for a large Mac shop, so I no longer have the headache of microsoft, and my days are filled with planning for future and improving the network, as opposed to putting out fires. But my hatred for MS is still strong from my previous jobs, and fixing relatives' PCs. Luckily I've got them all switched to Macs, so I no longer spend my holidays cleaning the crap off their machines:) Thank you OS X:)
And oh yeah, lest I forget, Ballmer is a cretin, and I can't get the image of him squirting on the stage, yelling "developers, developers, developers."
Re:I think Microsoft's pretty neat (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft told IBM that they had an operating system ready for the 8088, so not to worry. They actually didn't, they bought one from a local business for a few tens of thousands of dollars, then a few years later sued them out of existence for trying to ad multitasking when Microsoft had other plans for MS-DOS at the time.
Plus open source, though I'm a big fan of it, is not the creator of the standard reference of the internet. That would be Unix, and at one time also TOPS-20. Though I guess Berkeley Unix (BSD), back when it was mostly encumbered, could be counted as open source although you couldn't look at their source unless you had a source license from AT&T for the encumbered bits.
So far your batting average is pretty poor, but that doesn't surprise me; someone crediting the IBM-PC commodizing hardware to Microsoft could only be refering to statements made by Windows marketing (I hear so often this claim that I think it comes from MS or their journalist lap-dogs and is not independently arived at.)
Re:One could argue this only (Score:4, Informative)
Mac OS X does the smart thing. Rather than screw up the OS with legacy support, it provides an emulator for the "classic" Mac OS to run applications inside of. Thus you get the best of both worlds.
To put it another way, Super Wing Commander works fine on my Mac. The DOS WC games either fail miserably or need tweaking to get working. (Obviously, both require a slowdown utility.) IMHO, the Mac ends up having superior backward compatibility.
microsoft incentives are opposed to mine (Score:2, Informative)
The problem is that in many respects what is good for Microsoft is not good for consumers. This does not happen in most healthy industries, where firms want to delight consumers. In this case, Microsoft can coerce all us in order to make a profit. Let me point to some examples, it would be nice if we all together could collect a longer list:
But Microsoft is not evil, it does what companies do: maximize shareholder value. The problem is that their profit maximization, imposes a tremendous social cost on the rest of us. It is difficult to put a value to the social cost of Microsoft because it means speculating about innovations that have not happened, but could have occurred without a player like Microsoft out there. My gut feeling is that all the money that the Gates foundation can donate will not match the cost that Microsoft will have imposed on society.
We are the technology leaders of this world, we can stop Microsoft if we want.
Re:One could argue this only (Score:2, Informative)
ahhhh it does, what do you think a BSOD is? it is the OS blocking the drivers from doing unacceptable actions, like accessing memory areas it shouldn't. When a driver controlling hardware does something bad the Operating System has very little options, What do you do when the display driver trys to overwrite kernel memory? or the motherboard sata driver crashes with an exception, All any OS can do is stop, a BSOD IS protection and shows that the abstraction layer is there and works, what would be a sign it doesn't work is if you had a monolithic model (like certain other unamed OSes) where the system simply continues on till it dies or freezes or any number of other random results.
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:3, Informative)
Standards and Options (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a web developer. I use Firefox, because I like it and it follows standards. So I create a web page with some nice CSS, and it looks perfect. Then, I look at it in IE, and it's not that it just doesn't look as good, it's broken. Internet Explorer has it's own way of handling margins, padding, horizontal rules, etc. They also assign default values to things that shouldn't have them. It's really irritating. Often, the differences cause things to break and render horribly. Then I have to get creative and hack the CSS so that IE doesn't shit a brick when it renders the page. The worst part is that the only reason I can see for them to not follow standards is because they "want to be different".
The second is lack of options in their software, especially defaults. I'll give you a perfect example. At work, in a corporate environment, we're forced to use Antepo for instant messaging. Besides being a piece of crap that breaks down all the time, it lacks options. If you click on a link, it tries to open Internet Explorer, even if your default browser is Firefox. Better yet, I have IE7 and IE6 installed, so that I can fix the above mentioned rendering problems. IE7 is what's officially installed on the system, but Antepo will open links in IE6. What the fuck is that? And how about a line-break? You hit shift-enter, and you would expect your text to continue on the next line. Not in Antepo. You get three line breaks, and you can't do shit about it. On, and about the links, you can't click on a link someone has sent you unless they place a space behind the link. What the fuck is that?
This is just my list of complaints from THIS WEEK ALONE.
Bottom line: I hate Microsoft because they can't design software worth a shit.
Aero
Some more I just thought of. IE7 breaks Dreamweaver 8. Dreamweaver 8 can no longer store passwords and logins once you install IE7. I don't know if this is the fault of Macromedia(Adobe) or Microsoft, but it's fucking stupid. Also, whoever designed Microsoft Frontpage needs to be burned at the stake. If I ever catch those motherfuckers..
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...)
Re:Not complete innovation? (Score:1, Informative)
(uncountable)
How much money does it spend on research?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/06/20
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/120606-micr
How many times has it innovated?
http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html [dwheeler.com]
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/opinions/msinnov
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation.s
http://www.mcmillan.cx/innovation.html [mcmillan.cx]
This last dude gave up, Last updated 27 June 1999. Basically, it came down to a list of all accepted innovation nominations compared to two accepted: Microsoft Bob (doubtful but accepted) and the fucking talking paper clip. Which is basically Bob redone as a more annoying Help file.
all I did was a google search for "microsoft innovate" without quotes, and I came up with ZERO microsoft sites, and a whole bunch which put "innovate" into the quotes it deserves.
Worthless software company. The only things they did right are SQL server (derived from Sybase, and even though it was apparently recoded it shares similar syntax), which actually has a decent track record on security issues, and of course Visual Studio (IMO until the
Dinkumware info, apparently there is a license dispute so that MS can't package the updates in a visual studio service pack, so Dinkumware tells which lines to edit and how:
http://www.dinkumware.com/vc_fixes.html [dinkumware.com]
std::string causes corruption. Sorry we can't fix it, upgrade to
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813810 [microsoft.com]
"When you build applications in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 that use the supplied Standard Template Library (STL), memory corruption may occur, or your computer may stop responding. "
Origins of MSC compiler
http://www.nimh.org/microsoft/ [nimh.org]
"`This is just a historical note about the C compiler microsoft sells. In the late 80's I was developing C programs under DOS using the Lattice C compiler. One day I got a letter from Lattice saying they were out of the C compiler business, I should contact microsoft for support. I found out that microsoft bought the compiler and exclusive rights to sell it from Lattice. "
O man I just pissed myself off again rehashing all that ineptitude.
wikipedia is the source of all knowledge (Score:1, Informative)
Re:One could argue this only (Score:1, Informative)
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 ;).
That sounds pretty superficial (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing could be further from the truth; I in general don't care if a company makes money, unless I happen to own it, so that's not it.
The problem with MS has nothing to do with money or envy.
The problem with MS is that they:
* Pervert standards (ActiveX, J++, Kerberos, OfficeXML, aso)
* Lie to customers (wait for us, we're the leader)
* Lock in customers with secret protocols and formats.
* Blackmail non-buyers bosses.
* Conduct smear campains against people who'd rather use competing products
* Lobby and threaten politicians who are thinking about open source.
* Do everything they can to limit customer choice to their own product,
illegally if they have to.
MS is generally a drag on the industry and we would all be better off if it was destroyed.
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:3, Informative)
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.Re:Who did better? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Informative)
How do I hate thee, MS? Let me count the ways.... (Score:2, Informative)
NotePad doesn't cut it (Score:3, Informative)
Both applications have barely evolved over the last 15 years, but could have offered a lot more functionality without becoming bloated.
negative paradigm shift for nearly all management (Score:2, Informative)
Most of all, though, Microsoft changed, in a totally negative way, the herd instincts of corporate management. In the pre-Microsoft success days, many companies tried to produce quality products, and most others paid lip service to the concept, since it was considered a positive selling point. However, since Microsoft got lucky with the IBM contract for DOS, shipping beta (DOS 2 & 4, W95, W98FE, NT4) or even alpha (DOS 5, ME, NT3x, various NT4 service packs), code to customers, using them as testers and charging them for the privilege, it has become a standard corporate mantra that it does not matter how bad a product is, one must merely "establish market share" to succeed. We can all see how well that has worked for the American based automobile manufacturers (the two of them that remain).
What the suits fail to understand is how Microsoft got to where they are (not the underhanded and illegal parts, those, they do understand). When the PC was released there was almost no rational justification for buying one. All the available software (Word Processors, Spreadsheets, Databases, terminal emulators, and games) ran on Apple IIs or CP/M-80 boxes. Additionally, PCs and the software were much more expensive and significantly slower. The difference was that "corporate buyers" wouldn't buy Apples, but would willingly piss away shareholder's wealth on PCs, 'cause "you couldn't be fired for buying IBM" (pure bureauratic cowardice). Once the PCs ended up on middle manager's desktops, helped by a generous policy on software piracy, they would buy one to continue work at home. This created a secondary market for software on those machines, in households with available funds, for games and other "home use" software, like screen savers, once the top-selling category of all software, leading to where we find ourselves now.
Bit of background: IBM originally developed the PC because the "Big Blue Suits" in Austin were very peeved at seeing so many Apple IIs in IBM's headquarters. Middle managers found that they could get results faster using the spreadsheets and databases on those than sending jobs down to the IT department. Having created the product for internal use, there was very little cost involved in pushing them through the normal sales channels. Some success there led to expansion into the "office machine" dealers market (IBM made good typewriters).
A bit more: the PC has the worst-possible CPU architecture that could be coerced into stumbling along because IBM purchasing selected the CPU vendor, not engineering. The engineers had selected the Zilog Z8000 (not Z80) which had multiple orthogonal registers and a very powerful instruction set (at the time) for them. The engineers liked it because it was conceptually similar to the mainframe CPU and quite powerful (first UNIX, Version 6, as I remember, that I logged into was on a Z8000). Purchasing liked to have "leverage" over outside vendors, so they selected Intel, about to go under due the poor perfomance and complicated interface of the 8080, compared to the 6502 and 6800/6809, while Zilog was under the umbrella of a small company called "Exxon", where IBM had no leverage.
Since you asked (Score:2, Informative)
The Gimp [gimp.org]
4 very bad things (Score:2, Informative)
1. Unlawful monopolistic practices have led to a situation where it is hard to buy a laptop without Windows licence (for running other OSes)
2. Their technology is simply bad in all respects except C#.
The operating system has thousands of seemingly random places of configuration files, many of which are not understandable by text editor inspection.
The C programming API lacks definite power of UNIX filesystems/names (how many times have you seen a notice that says a file is reserved by some application?), that is, good separation of dentries and inodes.
The rest of the Win32 API is mostly random chunk that is hard or inconvenient to use. See
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/spinellis97critique.h
Ironically a more advanced API (the NP API) was instroduced with the NT, but it was left undocumented by Microsoft and thus it is not used for applications.
Furthermore, their technology is FULL of hacks and workarounds, but the main reason for bugginess of their system is BAD design and implementation.
3. They hostile towards operating systems by obfuscating and hiding their file formats and protocols. Think of Windows file and print services, Windows Media, Microsoft Word,
4. They are hostile towards technology improvement. Windows OS (but mostly applications) is practically useful with only x86 line processors, which slows down development of microprocessors. Windows is not even a good OS to take advantage of x86-64, let alone Itanium that they dumped. Fortunately, F/OSS operating systems made it possible to test and use those better processors with real applications from very early development to this day.
Also, the OS is a mess because they have REFUSED to fix it; the main drive has been money through gradual backwards compatible changes that has added to the mess.
5. The Windows culture is hostile towards maintainable systems. Where is the package management system that would be so desperately needed by ALL users of Windows? It would be simple to create a distributed package management system like apt in Debian, which would ease updates and installing software for all parties. Having a package management system would not even require Microsoft, but why hasn't Microsoft done it? Do they just hate convenience, or why is their update system such useless?
Summary: All in all, Microsoft has been harmful to all parties surrounding their operating system: the hardware and software people, consumers, users and administrators.
PS. sorry for "gain saying", it would take hours and hours to write comprehensive explanations of these points.
Re:Multiple OSes are good - monopolies are bad (Score:2, Informative)
He made an incomplete statement. Microsoft continued to support Hebrew but not in the Mac version of MS Office. The goal apparently to get people to drop Mac and switch to Windows where Office does support Hebrew. Israel offered to pay the costs of keeping Office up to date on the Mac.
Re:One could argue this only (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:2, Informative)
For that matter, Intel emulates Intel's x86 architecture as much as AMD does (x86 instructions are translated into smaller RISC-like instructions on all modern CPUs).
In a sense, "instruction set" is to a modern CPU the same thing as "API" is to a piece of software.
Re:One could argue this only (Score:3, Informative)
If you need to run Classic apps, then try SheepShaver. It emulates a PowerPC Mac, and runs System 7.5.2 to 9.0.4, and even supports things like copy and paste with native OS X apps. If you need to run older applications, try Basilisk II, which emulates a Motorola 68k Mac, and runs anything up to System 8.something.
There comes a point where it just makes more sense to run legacy apps in emulations. I can run most of my old DOS apps in DosBOX on OS X a lot better than I can run them in Windows (unless I install DOSBox there too). Win16 programs tend to run fine with WINE.
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One could argue this only (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:5, Informative)
1. As a college student I paid under $20 for my copy of WinXP, but would have had to pay ~$45 for MacOS X. Although this doesn't tend to defeat your argument, it sure does lower one of the reasons not to use Windows and makes OS X the one which needs to prove itself.
2. I know how to use Windows. These were skills I built up before ever owning my own PC, mostly when I was living at home using my parents PC, and my Dad used Windows because it was built on DOS, the earliest OS he knew. What you say above is right once you get to know how to use Windows you don't want to anymore, but alas I've already paid for it and have a box which does pretty much everything I call on it to do, so there isn't any reason to need another PC or to switch.
3. I have very rarely been called on to know/learn a piece of software that doesn't run on Windows. I have on the other hand been called on to know/learn Power Point, Word, Excel, InDesign, and many others. This is excluding text editors run on Linux machines for my CS classes, but then they haven't cared which one I use so on WinXP at home I use Notepad++, and in lab on Linux I use nedit.
4. If I want a Linux box I'll build one and will be able to do it on the cheap. So I'm not worried about getting one right now, when I'm college style poor, I'd rather have steak once in a while.
5. My friends/relatives/co-workers/group-members know how to use Windows and thus I don't have to try and explain Linux everytime they want to do something on my computer; this happens quite frequently I might add.
6. The games, I know you tried to blow this off with consoles but thats not a valid argument, because as a cheap/poor college student I can't afford to buy an XBox 360 or a PS3 or a Wii or whatever. And I don't enjoy console gaming as much either so atleast let me have my own preferences in that realm, without just telling me that my preference doesn't matter. I don't own any consoles and don't really plan on buying one for a good while.
As a note I would not consider myself a Windows "fanboi" but I do feel Windows is right for me, right now, and I feel anyone telling me I'm wrong is really in no place to say so. Your choice of OS really boils down to circumstances and that is all there really is to it.
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:2, Informative)
I had a student one semester -- a middle-aged woman -- who struggled with even the simplest tasks. A lot of it was UI issues. She often knew what she needed to do, and even more-or-less how to do it, but she just couldn't figure out the sequence of mouse clicks and drags necessary. She worked hard, practiced and studied like no one else in the class, and did decently well on the written tests -- but the lab exams gave her a ton of trouble (the lab exams were open-note, open-reference, even open-Google exams). She wrote down detailed notes for herself, and asked me for help during every lab, but invariably if there were any detail she failed to write down, she would have to struggle for 5-10 minutes during the exam to figure it out. She wasn't taking the class because she needed it, she was taking it *because* she had so much trouble with computers, and wanted to get better. She was motivated, but the UI just wasn't intuitive to her. She seemed to be of average intelligence, and her husband actually worked at IBM (which was part of her motivation to improve, actually).
Granted, I've never seen anyone else struggle with the Windows UI like she did, but I had others who lost points due to UI issues as often as from ignorance about what to do. Of course, I'm also not trying to say that I think she would have done significantly better with another UI -- I just don't know.
I take issue with your premise (Score:2, Informative)
According to Forbe's Magazine 2006 survey, Microsoft is the 6th most admired company on the globe. Here's how the top 10 look:
1 General Electric
2 Toyota Motor
3 Procter & Gamble
4 FedEx
5 Johnson & Johnson
6 Microsoft
7 Dell
8 Berkshire Hathaway
9 Apple Computer
10 Wal-Mart Stores
I personally think MS is terrific. I use many of their products and make a living designing and implementing their server and desktop solutions. Like any company I can point to questionable choices in their product development. But when I look at the big picture I truly admire what they have done and continue to do.
Nothing evil to see here.