I was hoping against hope that Chas. E would follow his own advice when he said “I strenuously urge SDMB readers not to participate in this thread.” I wonder how many hours his fingers twitched after he wrote that before he could take no more and rushed to the keyboard to bless us with his sagacious wisdom.
No. But they don’t have to post to this thread, either. So, just in case it wasn’t clear before (apparently, Mr. E can’t grasp the blatantly obvious), I just wanted to assure everyone that posting to this thread is completely voluntary. Heck, maybe I should ask the Mods to add that little clause to the thread title.
Unless you try to pass off that opinion as fact. Tell me, Mr. E, what exactly makes you think that “Microsoft” (I assume you believe that the whole company thinks with a collective consciousness) believes itself to be the most powerful thing on the face of the Earth?
So now you’re comparing Microsoft to a nuclear weapon.
You ARE delusional, aren’t you?
Using your logic (although it’s an affrontery to all forms of logic to call the spastic neurons snapping around in your fodder-filled skull “logic”), one could say that using anything OTHER than Microsoft products is an open endorsement of terrorism.
Thank you for proving my point (yet again), Mr. E. Hey, Math Geek… the thing you have to keep in mind is that I’m NOT referring to the people who have been miffed and disappointd by Microsoft’s actions or products… I’m referring to the stark-raving mad, frothing-at-the-mouth, “I’d kill Bill Gates and eat his corpse if I had the chance” kind of looney-tunes like Mr. E.
Sure thing. I “like” Microsoft’s products because, to date, I haven’t noticed any major glitches when using them. I haven’t experienced the “numerous” crashes and glitches in Windows, I haven’t experienced the faults that some have touted about Office, and Frontpage has been an excellent program for me. As for its business practices, I haven’t noticed anything unique to Microsoft that isn’t rampant in the business world… MS just got caught. As for Bill Gates, he’s been an amazing philanthropist, donating billions to charity funds (granted, a charity fund that he started himself, but that’s more than can be said for some other rich folks).
As for the general population… I find Microsoft’s products to cover the most bases in terms of compatibility. Apple products, or Linux, have shortcomings in terms of compatibility, and all other options that I’ve tried have had other shortcomings, as well… since the car comparison has already been used, I’ll use it again: Other products are akin to having an extremely powerful, extremely reliable car, that only runs on specialized types of fuel and have a more complex means of operation. In my experiences (which, despite Mr. E’s bloated “I’m older than you, so I’m right” attitude, is considerable), Microsoft has managed to meld the right mix of availability, reliability, compatibility, and power… FOR ME. Your Mileage May Vary, which doesn’t justify - IMOSHO - an open condemnation of the company.
Now, Chas, I took your little “challenge”… you gonna put up, or shut up?
And it ended up in the same mindless “Oh yeah, prove it” just like I said it would. I merely sought to reinforce my admonition. It is pointless to engage in such discussions. Game over.
Uh… no, it didn’t.
Additionally, are you using this excuse to explain why you never, EVER back up your claims with real evidence, or why you never apologize for your assholicry?
Chas.E wrote
You must really impress yourself with such genius. You said that people would demand even one shread of evidence for your preposterous assertions, and lo! it was so.
I only hope your awesome powers will one day be recognized appropriately.
Who wouldn’t hate a giant, multinational corporation named after its founder’s dick?
Totalitarianism != Nazi Germany, it is according to MW “centralized control by an autocratic authority”. He didn’t call anyone Nazis.
Stop misquoting people and drop the juvenile name changing - it sort if stopped being funny after kindergarten.
As for reasons to dislike MS, how about their use of a default security policy in apps such as IE, Outlook and Office that led to the sheer flood of script and macro viruses we’ve seen recently. How can a company justify putting out products that have such glaring holes in their default settings? Considering MS products are the popular choice for the novice end of the market, they have to know that a lot of their market won’t be aware that of these issues, but they just don’t seem to give a fuck.
Well shit, I think we all can agree with this.
Damn, Spoofe, you ask why, we try to tell you why, and you’re in SHOCK that people would dare to post to this thread with the very attitudes you ask us to justify!
OK, let’s try peeling this apart just a bit. The question is actually a compound question.
- PLATFORM – Leaving Microsoft out of it momentarily, why might the user of one OS or platform hate the company responsible for another? Back in the middle 1980s, those of us who used Macs or Amigas were most likley to hate IBM. Sure, it was a MS OS that ran on the IBM PC, but its ubiquity at that time had very little to do with Microsoft and everything to do with IBM. The PC was an inferior machine and ours were both far far better, yet we had to cope with everything from derision to the lack of equal considerations and services in a world where those godawful klunky boxes had become the standard. And they had become the standard not because legions of people thought working on an IBM PC was better than working on an Amiga or a Mac, but because corporations bought business equipment from IBM Corporation and their bean counters were amenable to purchasing PCs from IBM when they had not been open to buying an Apple or a Commodore, or (at this point) a Mac or an Amiga.
Hop forward a few years to the early 1990s and poll the unhappy world of Amiga users and you might find some serious Macintosh haters as well as PC/Microsoft haters among them. The Mac by then had established itself as the computer that artists and creative folk use, and I know many Amigaphiles hated it that very few people knew that the Amiga had had color when the Mac was a black & white box, could run circles around the Mac if you wanted to digitize and edit video and audio. But the Amiga was dying and the Mac was being purchased and it and its programs were the standard for the creative work that the Amiga could excel in. And the Mac had in part attained that status as a result of its success in the education market (art students in college would learn the Mac because colleges had Macs), which in turn had been attained in part because of Apple’s previous stature in schools via the Apple II. Mostly, though, Amiga zealots directed their hatred towards the PC (IBM & Microsoft) and towards Commodore itself, a company which could not have successfully marketed ice cold water to heat-parched desert travelers dying of thirst.
- CORPORATION - Again leaving MS out of it momentarily, why might people harbor hate for a company that they perceive as arrogant and prone to business practices that ruin things for other competing companies and for people in general? Consider ExxonMobil, considered by many to be reprehensible among major international oil companies. It isn’t easy to stand out among oil companies as unusual for one’s greed, exploitative personnel practices, and tendency to damage the planet’s ecosystem, but here’s a company that seems to have managed. I know people that view them as the reincarnation of the old Standard Oil that had to be trust-busted. Many folks think Exxon has gotten away with oil spill after oil spill because they can afford to buy legislators the way smaller companies can only buy the services of a lobbyist.
Or think of Procter and Gamble. (Never mind the Satanic rumors, wiseguy!). Go into your local supermarket and try to buy a bottle of dish soap and a box or bottle of laundry detergent that AREN’T made by P&G! They practically own the entire market, and therefore when they change their portion of the entire product line in some fashion, they have effectively changes the product line in its entirely, as there is no meaningful competition. Consider the “concentration” trend in liquid laundry detergents. The cleaning power of 1/4 cup was first concentrated to about 1/8 cup, and then halved again a few years later. The much smaller bottles cost as much as the old bigger bottles. This is lucrative for P&G because most people aren’t comfortable putting less than a tablespoon of laundry detergent in their wash (and the huge caps that double as measuring cups didn’t shrink, big surprise there), so folks are spending more for laundry detergent as a result of using more than they need. Competition, such as it is, was unable to enunciate why it was better to buy their unconcentrated detergent, and if they didn’t concentrate as well they lost out on the spoils of doing so, so they do it too now. There are probably better examples of nasty or unfair business practices, in particular those that stem from possession of a market monopoly, but this should be sufficient to serve as an example.
- APPLICATIONS - As with the detergent-concentration thing, if the products that are available are made in a way that you don’t like – (I happen to hate trying to estimate pouring a tablespoon of laundry detergent into one of those enormous caps) – then you may end up hating those products. If the niche is so totally dominated by the products of one corporation that you can’t find products even from a competitor that haven’t ended up emulating the product you hate, you may start hating the company itself for foisting this standard upon us.
OK, Spoofe – The above are reasons why a person (or many many people) might hate a corporation to which these circumstances apply. As you can probably guess, many folks thing one or more of these descriptions tends to apply to Microsoft. Do you find this plausible so far?
If you wish to defend Microsoft from any one of these, or from all of them concurrently, you are of course free and welcome to do so. Our eyes may roll, but we’ll probably read. The burden of proof, such as it exists at all, falls on you (and other Microsoft defenders), however; the premise is not that Microsoft should be charged with a crime or split up by DOJ or its crappy products removed from the shelves of CompUSA, the premise is that people who hate Microsoft can’t justify doing so. Oh??
Heck, I hate MacDonald’s for far less (irritating commercials and lousy food) and you’d have a hard time convincing me I have no goddam business hating MacDonald’s.
Microsoft sucks. I ain’t a juror or a prosecutor, just a computer user, and I have sufficient reason to hate Microsoft.
so SPOOFE, someone already posted a link to the DRDOS issue. You’re initial “How so?” reply to when it was brought up seems to indicate you’ve never heard of it - which would be suprising for someone who claims to have an opinion about Microsoft’s business practices. Anyway, now you know about it. Any comments?
Of course that’s just one issue. If you want proof of anti-competitive behavior (can we agree that’s a bad thing?) then just read up on the big trial. Of course if you want more reasons to hate Microsoft, read up on their behavior during the trial.
There’s no need for us to repeat all this, or even attempt to prove it ourselves. A court of law demands more proof than you do, and they found Microsoft to be acting illegally. And acting illegally is just one reason to hate Microsoft…
Why I hate Microsoft:
-
Both MS Windows and MS applications are buggy and slow, and require significantly more resources than they should to do what they do.
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Because they dominate the market, very little software gets written for anything but Windows. I would use Linux at home, if I could buy software for it.
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Because of their anti-competitive practices (several examples have already been given in this thread), they have prevented a great deal of innovation and unfairly prevented people from doing business.
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They charge $100 for “upgrades” which any respectable company would call “patches” and give away for free. If you buy a buggy version (e.g. Win95), and it doesn’t work, tough luck.
If they didn’t do #3, they’d just be a company who makes bad products which too many people use. Very irritating, to be sure, but not actively horrible. #3 is what makes them evil.
No, they don’t; in fact, they do a piss-poor job of it. (Of course, I may just be in a bad mood since our PDC locked up hard this morning for no apparent reason.)
We have here four Windows servers and one Linux server. The Linux server is on identical hardware to two of the Window servers. The Linux machine routinely runs for months at a time without having to be restarted. The Windows servers must be restarted on a regular basis to keep them from going south. (The aforementioned PDC that locked up had not been restarted for a while, which is probably why it locked up.) Frankly, this is not a characteristic of a “excellent” or even “decent” operating system. I expect servers to run continuously without crashing under any condition short of hardware failure (and with RAID5 controllers, I expect them to survive even through that).
Strangely enough, Linux, which is developed by a group of “ragtag hackers” with a tiny fraction of Microsoft’s development budget, handles about 90% of the hardware combinations that Windows does (not to mention a lot of hardware that Windows doesn’t). Most of the hardware that Linux does not handle it does not handle because manufacturers refuse to release the specifications to the “ragtag hackers” that would allow drivers to be written. Even with this degree of noncooperation (usually the result of anticompetitive agreements entered into with Microsoft), the drivers get written anyway, because these “ragtag hackers” are so industrious, clever, persistent, and, most importantly, unselfish.
When I had a strange problem with some hardware on a new machine running Linux, I was able to post to the kernel hackers list describing the problem and get a fix within 48 hours for the problem that worked perfectly. That system has run continuously since, being shut down only twice, once due to a power failure and once when it was moved to a colocation hosting site. I have no reason to believe that this machine will not still be running, without a reboot, a year from now. (And, yes, it is being actively used: it hosts two websites, DNS for about 40 domains, and handles some of our corporate email.) Kindly show me a Windows server that has been running for a year without a reboot that is actually being used for more than a space heater. There are Linux servers in active use which have been running for over four years without being rebooted.
Microsoft makes a very pretty desktop, but underneath that glitter and flash is a very ugly and very messy body of highly unstable code that can only be an “excellent” example of crap.
I say, SPOOFE, what is your relationship with Microsoft? Do you work for them? Resell their products? Do you have one of their certifications? Do you even know what a PDC is?
Links galore!
One
Two
The Mother of The Register trial coverage archives.
While at first blush, it appears that The Register has an anti-MS editorial slant, the truth is that they’re an equal-opportunity gadfly. Their motto says it all: “Biting the hand that feeds IT”. It’s just that M$ has supplied such enourmous quantities of ridicule-worthy material. Follow the links, as El Reg is very good about linking to source material and analysis.
Happy reading!
Oddly enough, I find all my Apple products to be completely “compatible” with everything I want them to be “compatible” with, including PC applications and documents. Same certainly can’t be said for Microsoft products, and that’s exactly the way Bill likes it.
stoid
I did a stint at Novell, who bought DRDOS. I played with it alot, trying to make it work. I really wanted to make it work, since it had a number of (supposed) cool features. But I couldn’t because…
It’s a steaming pile of dung. period.
This nonsense about “its a fine program but its being held down by the man” is crap.
And as supporting evidence, I use 4DOS constantly and have for years. 4Dos is another command.com replacement, and it’s darn fine. Never an issue with Microsoft holding them down, even though they’re competitors.
I believe the “trains running on time” was a specific reference to Mussolini’s Italy. Fascist, yes. Nazi, no. History lessons aside, Gary said it best.
Gary I think you missed the whole point of the ‘rolleyes’ smiley. I was insulting Chas.E’s logic. I don’t know how you TOTALLY missed the sarcasm in my post. I even included that smiley to emphasize it.
I don’t hate Microsoft and I use their products on a daily basis. They usually do what I need them to do. But there have been instances over the years where the relationship has been strained.
[ul]
[li] Generating multi-page table of contents for documents drives me crazy as I battle to get a proper page break between the end of the TOC and the start of the actual document. Also, the page numbers with a title page and TOC can be a bitch to set right.[/li]
[li] I once had the pleasure of being on the negotiation team for a large Select Contract for site licensed Microsoft products. The verbiage and licensing structure was so labyrinthine and restrictive that even the Microsoft reps helping to put together the contract had difficulty at times understanding what was being said.[/li]
[li] Office 97 was released without a complete set of translators for backward compatibility with prior versions of Office. Not so bad except when you’re trying to roll it out to a large user base spread all over the globe. Coexistence was a nightmare during the actual migration.[/li]
[li] Jim Allchin, VP of platforms at MS, made a statement that open source software stifles innovation. Later on, the company backed off and said that his statements applied only in some instances, but it was a pretty ludicrous statement as originally stated.[/ul][/li]
Then there’s the whole monopoly business currently being battled in the courts.
Again, I don’t hate the company, but I do at times curse its name.
Testify, brother. I know your pain.
While I eventually got the solution I was looking for, thanks to the kind responses in that thread, I was still steamed that Microsoft had to make a simple task such a fucking chore.
I’m seriously tempted to run out and get WordPerfect for Windows, because I remember how good it was for me when I was using my Macintosh.
Having made the switch from Mac to Windows last October, I’ve decided that while there are some things I like about my new computer, there are some other things that I don’t like. With the Mac, I really knew the purpose of every item in my System folder, and modifying it to address problems with conflicts and application errors was simplicity itself. Windows is a labyrithine enigma.
I always have heard good things about DRDOS. At any rate, it’s besides the point - from your argument you probably haven’t seen this link:
http://www.ddj.com/articles/1993/9309/9309d/9309d.htm
This is the evidence… if you disagree tell me why.