Replay wrote:I think I mostly posted this to instigate with Zeus. :D Tell me again how much you hate Microsoft, Zeusy. Vent at me. Explain your problems because they (M-$uccess) are AWESOME, you all just don't know it yet how awesome they are.
Well, you asked for it:
Microsoft owns a near monopoly on operating systems for the PC, and has abused that monopoly for generations.
It all started out when Bill Gates and their small team released PC-DOS. Except it wasn't something that Microsoft made. It was something called QDOS, or Quick and Dirty Operating System. It was a rip off of UNIX in a totally stripped down capacity. The OS was sold to them for $50,000. Microsoft hid their relationship with IBM to get it for so cheap. That later spawned a lawsuit. (SCP, the inventor of QDOS, got $1 million for the lawsuit.) So, for the very beginning, Microsoft started as a company that doesn't invent anything, and steals from other people.
On top of that, they have:
* Put OS/2 in the grave by strong arming OEMs and software developers
* Nearly prevented OEMs from selling Linux PCs by threatening to pull all Microsoft contracts from those OEMs
* Bought entire companies just to bury a product
* Forced Netscape out of business by bundling IE with Windows for free
* Forced "One Laptop per Child" to promote Windows XP, instead of Linux, which uped the price of the Laptop project, and defeated the purpose of OLPC.
* Bought SCO for the sole purpose of a lawsuit against IBM to bring down *NIX operating systems, and elevate SCO's stock.
* Continues to write some of the buggiest, bloated, and security breaking OSs in the market, which people are forced to buy because 98% of the applications are designed for Windows.
* Continues to promote
FUD around Linux and open-source
* Has enforced a policy of "
Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" to take standards as their own and eventually make those standards under the total control of Microsoft
* Tried to unseat Google in the search engine department by spending BILLIONS of dollars in marketing for a search engine which is basically a poor duplicate of Google.
*
Many, many, many other examples
In most cases, what they did was illegal by US law, as they were abusing their monopoly. However, this requires an expensive lawsuit each time, so they get away with it most of the time.
Tell me again how much you hate Microsoft, Zeusy. Vent at me. Explain your problems because they (M-$uccess) are AWESOME, you all just don't know it yet how awesome they are.