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Answered!Why is Microsoft so widely considered evil? (self.OutOfTheLoop)

ric2b が 投稿

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I was born in the 90's so maybe I missed a lot of bad stuff they did, but the impression I get from the last 10 years of the company is that they are just a normal business.

For the last 3 or 4 years I'd even say they are one of the best big tech companies, they seem to take customer feedback heavily into consideration and are providing their products for cheaper and in more platforms.

So, is there something I'm missing? Are they evil behind my back? Were they evil before and are now a good company? Or were they never evil at all and this is all fanboyism?

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[–]minecraft_ece 31ポイント32ポイント  (0子コメント)

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For a while, Microsoft had a monopoly position on the personal computer market, and they abused that position to the detriment of everyone:

1) They forced hardware vendors to not offer competing operating systems with the following deal: you can pay $20 per machine for every machine you ship (whether it has windows on it or not), otherwise it's full retail price per machine with windows. Sounds innocent enough, but the net effect is that no large hardware vendor could afford to ship non-windows PCs.

2) The infamous "embrace-extend-extinguish" strategy Microsoft employed to deal with any perceived threats. Any idea or technology with was a threat to the microsoft monopoly (by usually being compatible with competing platforms) would first be embraced publicly by microsoft with their own version. This would include microsoft specific extension that would work only on windows. Once a majority of develops were on the windows versions, further extensions and changes would be made to break compatibility with the original cross platform technology. The biggest example being.....

3) Internet explorer. A non-standard browser with proprietary plugin architecture (activex) that due to monopoly position became a defacto standard for many years. Microsoft engineered their development toolchain on getting developers to embrace the proprietary activex, not the open html/javascript part. The end result was a huge number of business applications that despite being webapps were nonetheless locked into running only on IE6 on windows.

And to make matters worse, once Microsoft achieved this lock-in, they sat on IE6 for many years, holding back the development of the entire internet industry for years and costing businesses millions in extra development costs to make sure web sites worked in internet explorer as well they did in other browsers. You almost had to develop the same site twice: once for modern browsers and again for internet explorer.

In my opinion, the internet we have today we would have had 10 years ago if IE6 hadn't existed.

Having said that, evil has "evolved" and companies today engage in practices far worse that anything microsoft did.

[–]darkman41 9ポイント10ポイント  (0子コメント)

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They used their monopoly position to intimidate Spyglass, inc to license their browser code (which became Internet Explorer), and when Microsoft decided to start giving it away, argued that since it was free the amount they owed Spyglass from "sales" was $0.

[–]DragovicNot really in the loop, just has Google 10ポイント11ポイント  (1子コメント)

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I'm not sure why everyone on this thread is so focused on the price of the OS. I would think the whole incident with various governments having to step in because they became a monopoly through unethical business practices like creating a license agreement with a company called Spyglass to pay a royalty fee for every copy of their web browser sold but instead of selling it, they bundled it with their OS and gave it away for free, would be a more obvious argument.

They're also known for buying out competitors to the point that the former Sun Microsystems chief executive liked to joke that Microsoft's research and development department and their mergers and acquisitions department are one and the same. All this combined with the fact that the early versions of Windows weren't that stable and incredibly frustrating to use made people start saying Microsoft is evil.

[–]ric2b[S] 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

ごめんなさい。これは既にアーカイブしてあり、もう投票はできません。

Thank you, this is the sort of thing I wanted to see! Concrete examples of actually unethical practises.

[–]vertebrate 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

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Back in the 1970s Microsoft started charging people for their Basic, whereas software was mostly free at the time. There is a well known letter Gates wrote to the community about paying for software rather than copying it. This was unpopular.

Later Microsoft struck a deal with IBM to provide an operating system for PCs, but they didn't have one. They instead bought the rights to 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, then turned around and licensed it to IBM. This made Microsoft billions of dollars, from about $75k for the rights. There were lawsuits later.

Microsoft also leveraged their monopoly position to shut out competing products, at least the courts of the world thought so.

I don't think they were evil. They were very good at making money and making deals.

Were.

[–]ric2b[S] 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

ごめんなさい。これは既にアーカイブしてあり、もう投票はできません。

Thanks for the input!

[–]agitamus 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

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  1. A long history of abusing their monolopy position and generally anti-competitive practices. They've been fined many times because of this alone but I suppose they just count those fines into their operating costs.

  2. They were/are the first and probably closest ally to the NSA in their illegal spying of everyone. They claim to care about your privacy and yet they collect and share what you do with their buddies at NSA.

  3. A ton of simply incredibly stupid decisions being forced on customers, and stuff that doesn't work. Windows 8 Metro, Xbox One Kinect, Games for Windows Live... Their online support is also an absolute nightmare based on my experiences.

[–]waco -3ポイント-2ポイント  (0子コメント)

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I used to think they were EVIL, now I just feel sorry for them. They are the Dr. Evil of OS.