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Originally posted by Microsoft Corporation:
You folks really like to bash Microsoft and hate them so much, but I bet none of you can even give a reasonable answer as to why.
you would lose your money in a second and if you had spent any time at all reading these forums you would not make such a silly claim, especially as the lead in to your supposedly sensible statement.
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It's as if it's the cool thing on the block these days to hate Microsoft, even if you are not educated on the topic and don't have a clue as to what you're talking about.
this may be true, and that's no bad thing in my opinion, however i agree with you that an informed opinion is the best and sometimes an uninformed opinion is worse than no opinion at all.
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First of all, please don't say that Microsoft is a greedy company.
oh here we go. Well why shouldn't i say that? they are a greedy company! all companies are greedy, or they would fail and go bust. This is fact. Anyone who has even a miniscule grasp of capitalism knows this. So microsoft are greedy.
However the main thing i want to say here is that you have attempted to misdirect the discussion here by stating that this topic will be about microsoft's greed. This topic will not be about greed, it will be about why people dislike microsoft.
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They are not greedy at all.
bollocks, see above.
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Microsoft does not cook the books and lie about their profits like Enron, Worldcom, and the others.
prove it. not that i am saying they do, i can't prove it, i don'tcare enough to try, but can you prove microsoft do not do this? why don't they? with big corporations, the law means "don't get caught". Anyone with a brain knows that corporations only stay legal to the extent that they feel they have to or face the long arm of the law. Why do you believe microsoft are the only exception?
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Microsoft is honest.
i won't comment too much on this. This statement is simply an idiotic falsehood. Someone who will blandly state that a huge company is honest fails on many levels to understand what a corporation is, what it does and how it came to be. Before you sputter with righteous and indignant rage, do your reading. study microsoft's history. They have screwed over literally every other computer company within arm's reach to get where they are. they screwed over seattle computing, digital equipment, apple, adobe, netscape, ibm and intel and many others. This is not my prejudiced mind making this up. as it happens i have just finished reading about the history of the PC for university and it mainly reads like a who's who of who microsoft have screwed over.
However i want to make one thing clear. so far we have not really touched why i dislike microsoft. All i have been doing is responding to your, quite frankly, ill founded comments in order to get your misdirection about honesty out of the way. Simply put: corporations are almost never honest. No corporation is always honest. No corporation is even mainly honest. Most things corporations do are not honest or dishonest, they simply are. People dealing with corporations expect dishonesty anyway. It would almost be dishonest not to give them what they expect.
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They make huge loads of money each year, and they are honest about it to the government. Because of their honesty about how much they make, they end up helping the middle and lower classes by carrying a heavier tax burden.
this is a fair, if minor point, however you fail to point out that actually everyone else pays their taxes too, to the extent that the law can force them to anyway. microsoft are not doing anything altruistic by paying their taxes. they are simply staying out of jail. your argument about helping the lower classes is a little more tenuous since microsoft's aggressive tactics in the retail market (forcing retailers not to stock competing products) creates a large amount of unemployment and puts a lot of small companies and shops out of business (or cuts them out of the market) at ground level since only larger retailers can afford to abide by microsoft's restrictive retail agreements. Of course the customer wants microsoft products so the retailer must agree to whatever microsoft wants them to sign, or go out of business.
How willing you are to take this on board will depend on your view of how capitalism works however i know several people who have worked with computers for almost as long as microsoft have been around, who say that the jobs microsoft have destroyed outnumbers the jobs that their effect has created.
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Also, Microsoft gives tons of money to charit like education and fighting aids.
uh huh. did you fall for this? i can't talk to someone who will swallow that crap.
bill gates gives a smaller percentage of his income to charity than i do and i say linux is better than microsoft. So because my contribution is greater by percentage than bill gates', will you now change your mind and use linux instead of windows?
no.
and the reason is this: you didn't see me on television and also you can't bring yourself to believe that my paltry contribution is the same as gates' because his contribution adds up to more money.
Well excuse me but what gates gives to charity is nothing to him. Nothing except good publicity that is. Seriously. How much advertising could his donations to charity buy? not much, that's what, but he gives it to charity instead and guess what? he gets on TV for free and people like you fall for the generous gates story and no doubt will continue to fall for it till long after he has stopped giving to anybody. Oh yes, you'll still be forking out for the forced upgardes and endless service packs when gates has long been dead and buried in his solid gold coffin.
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Microsoft also spends billions of dollars on research, which leads to the development of superb technologies.
hold on. superb?
again, do your reading. do you know what a computer virus is? Nearly ALL common operating systems are now virtually immune to computer viruses. Almost EVERY SINGLE popular system is virtually immune to viruses and worms. Their filesystems and system components are almost completely safe from attacks of all kinds. Do you understand that? there is only one exception. ALL operating systems from microsoft have NO protection against viruses. their filesystems do not support permissioning. Their system files can be changed by normal users. By default you do not need to enter a password to log in! you can view and alter other users' files! The mandatory components (such as IE and WMP) actually provide extra backdoors into the system which can be exploited by attackers! Even leaving aside the fact that their software is closed source, which means that potential bugs and holes cannot be found and reported (or fixed) by the users, their systems are still embarrasingly insecure. This is simply the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft's history of rubbish to mediocre software goes right back to their crippled version of BASIC for the Altair. Almost every single computer drawback since the seventies can be related to microsoft in some way. This is not, in common parlance, "superb".
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After spending tons of money to reseacrch digital media, Microsoft introduced the fantastic Windows Media Format, which can produce excellent quality at very low bitrates.
and which is closed so that nobody can make programs which encode or decode it unless they use the microsoft codec (and agree to microsoft's licence). also, we find out now that the only program which is allowed to play these files has the most restrictive end user licence agreement i have ever seen.
see here for more details. I do not think that simply to watch a video or listen to music i should have to agree that microsoft can legally access my hard drive at any time, or that they can retroactively change the terms of the agreement at any time and i will still be bound to it.
Given your track record as regards reading up on your subject beforehand, i assume you are the sort of person who does not read these agreements before pushing "ok", or as it's known nowadays "i submit, master". I suggest you read them from now on. go on. It might help you later on in court.
As an aside, the ogg vorbis format actually has a sound quality/bitrate ratio which is superior to windows media audio (and is much superior to mp3), and what's more the ogg vorbis format is a completely open standard (and as a result is being taken up faster than WMA is). I don't know if there's an equivalent video thing, i expect DivX to be it, although it's not entirely open.
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Currently, Microsoft is spending lots of money on researching digital rights management. Microsoft hopes to create a technology which will be great for both consumers and businesses and will put an end to internet crime and piracy problems.
just like the FBI are devoted to making everything peachy keen so all humans everywhere can enjoy mom's apple pie with a pearly white grin on their faces you mean? you have missed out so many facts in your broad statement that i am at a loss for how to respond.
tell you what, you explain in depth why you think digital rights management will be "great for both consumers and businesses" and also (and preferably seperately) why you think it will "put an end to internet crime", also i think that "piracy problems" is a separate third issue that i would like you to address in specific too. You cannot make such a sweeping stament including what are nothing more than buzzwords when used in this context without some (preferably a reasonable deal) of evidence to support yourself. let's hear why you think microsoft's crippleware is good and then we will talk about it, okay?
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So don't say that Microsoft is greedy.
didn't we cover this already? oh yes we did. and we decided thatyou are simply trying to put words into people'smouths as a form of indirection in order to make them angry instead of actually answering your question about why people dislike microsoft.
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IT IS NOT!
you're not really getting the hang of this, providing evidence does not just mean repeating yourself and saying "yes it is" and "no it's not" all the time.
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Microsoft also helps consumers by ensuring competition with other similar businesses, and as we all know competition leads to good quality products.
competition does, in a capitalist environment, drive products to better heights. You have, as many capitalists do, missed out two more important stages though. You are dwelling on the first stage here, which isa situation of healthy competition. two or more companies compete, they do this by trying to make a better product than each other at lower prices. microsoft never really did this because their tactic has always been to try to get as large a piece of the market before anybody else can compete. This is not just my opinion, it is fact. bill gates used to publicly state his intention to create a monopoly using the concept of the "de facto standard" (it means saturating the market with a closed format before any other organisation or officiating body can come up with a real standard) until about 1982 when his lawyers advised him to use more politically correct language. the sentiment and direction of microsoft of course remains the same.
anyway, back to the second stage. once the two companies have decided its too much work trying to beat the other guy (and some also ran startup companies have bit the dust in the meantime), they will call an uneasy truce. perhaps they split the market ("you do systems, i'll do applications", or
"you do software, i'll do hardware", whatever), they divide the turf in some way anyway, microsoft have done this most famously with apple computer and with IBM, but also they have done this with many other companies. With all of these companies, including apple and IBM, microsoft have broken their word. You can say all you like about how IBM and Apple and so on are not squeaky clean either but that's not the issue here. the issue is microsoft, and the facts are that with *every* truce arrangement microsoft has entered into, they have broken it. And importantly, they broke it first. Microsoft has never been screwed over by somebody else and retaliated, microsoft always casts the first stone, because at the end of the day, microsoft know how to do business better than most other computer companies, even IBM, which is in many ways still stuck in the past.
Where were we? oh yes, the third stage. When one company has finally backstabbed and tripped up all its competitors, of course they have an incredibly priveleged position in the market, and with a couple of decades of basically creating the market for themselves, a sensible company knows how to maintain this privileged position. This is not a monopoly. I cannot describe microsoft as a monopoly. Some people might, and in fact the US legal system would, but actually microsoft have left just enough of the various parts of the computer industry to other companies for it not to qualify as a monopoly. The reason they have done it this way is of course that monopolies get shafted by the law (like IBM did in the fifties). However this is not a nice healthy situation of competition like we described in stage one, because the one company in the privileged position commands the whole industry! all other companies are simply begging for table scraps while the big company does exactly what it wants. In my opinion this is worse than a monopoly because it not only stifles development (because it is in the interests of the controlling company to maintain the status quo), but it is an entirely legal situation, and so it can continue to stifle development indefinitely. This is the opposite of the healthy competition that you naively imagine still exists even after the computer industry has matured several times.
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For example, back in the mid 80s and 90s, operating systems were horrible. That is why computers were only used then by professionals.
actually it was because they cost a lot, but carry on...
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But Microsoft took all that trash away by making the Windows operating system, which was very easy to use and very attractive to consumers.
no it was ecause it was the same as apple's macintosh interface (this was the ruling of the court case at the time), but it was cheaper, and after microsoft bought the rights to copy apple macintosh's interface
until the end of time (now that was a clause apple's lawyers should have done something about!), microsoft's windows interface was attractive to consumers only because it gave them the apple mac interface (or damn near it) at a fraction of the price, especially since they could run windows on their cheap existing DOS machines (you had to spend a few thousand bucks to get an apple mac though). EVEN taking all this into consideration, ms windows still flopped for several
years before it actually caught on. windows 1.0 was utter rubbish, as was windows 2.0. windows 3.0 was severely hindered in the market by competing (and superior) products, but due to IBM dealing harshly with the competition, microsoft simply needed to beat IBM's effort, which they finally did with windows 3.1 and its variants. IBM's OS/2 was still technically superior but it was badly implemented (rushed) and more expensive and anyway IBM were worried about losing their hardware side to Compaq at the time and microsoft overtook them with ease. That's why windows was attractive to consumers, not because of ease of use.
All of what i just said is historical fact. You can verify it simply by doing the reading first. I suggest that you do that next time.
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Other businesses could not produce such good products so they eventually faded away.
dealt with this, see above.
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Now we have a first class operating system,
we have several. my favourite is known as "linux".
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and every family has at least one computer in their home with an operating system capable of doing anything!
no, the majority of human families still don't have a computer (not that it has anything to do with microsoft whether they do or not) and also most operating systems can do considerably less than "anything". However ms windows can certainly do a lot less things than most other desktop operating systems out there, which tend to come equipped with all sorts of utilities and programs that have been honed by the *ix and net community for years or decades.
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The same thing was also done with Microsoft Office - an excellent software package for anyone to do any kind of work.
but it's expensive, has an incredibly restrictive licence agreement, and it is not even compatible with some documents made using different versions of the *same* *program*, also newer versions do odd things like dialing the internet to send information even when you are not doing anything net related. Add to this the fact that personal metadata (your name, address, contents ofyour other files etc) is added to microsoft office documents secretly without your consent (leading to
this sort of thing (how embarrassing for the UK government! oddly they now publish their documents as PDFs...) and the whole thing seems like a total failure from a consumer's point of view.
Personally i prefer openoffice.org - it can handle all microsoft office files (more or less), as well as those from almost all other office programs, including abiword, sunoffice, wordperfect and so on and so on. It's also totally free and is, to my knowledge, the only free program that can create PDF files. Also, since openoffice is open source it gets developed a lot faster than microsoft office and is more stable (less prone to crashes and exploits etc, we all know how irritating those pesky things are, eh?
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Also, everyone who works at Microsoft loves their job.
everyone. uh huh. i think we have departed a little from what most people like to term "reality" now.
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That creates a great working environment, which leads to great, creative and innovational products!
that ending was as weak as your beginning and i won't rise to it.
frankly your position disappoints me. Do your reading and try to respond without anger and we'll see how we get on.
Now i have dealt with your post, other posters may feel free to continue by responding to the actual question:
Why exactly do you dislike microsoft?[ September 26, 2003: Message edited by: Calum ]
