How bad is Microsoft?
How bad is Microsoft?
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I was curious what the Linux people think about Microsoft and any bad practices that most people should know about already?
Microsoft is definitely the corpoest of them all.
Probably not the worst corpo, likely even, but out of the corpos, they are the most corpo corpo of any corpo.
- They own LinkedIn, and I could just stop this list here.
- They're the founding fathers of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.
- They are the vanguard of videogame studio consolidation, after buying Activision and Bethesda.
- AI
- Everything they do is soggy bread: you can eat it, it's probably mostly healthy, I think, but if a product is not the minimum viable product then it will be; take the Halo franchise as a reference for blandness, Windows for end user tolerance - both are controversial yet functional and popular software that people complain (and do nothing) about. Halo took quite a hit in popularity, but still...
- Remember when a software company got in trouble for monopolistic practices? That was a thing that happened at some point, and it was Microsoft. Not that it will ever happen again, nowadays all the cool kids have some slice of the tech landscape on a chokehold.
They tried to destroy linux and free/libre software, and when that didn't work, they started cornering the market and pushing for a move from "Free" to "Open Source." They also support SaaS model, and have made it next to impossible to get a new computer without their mediocre OS. On top of that, their OS is full of spyware, and is starting to become adware too.
But that all pales in comparison to the fact that you do not own your own OS: you can run Microsoft's OS, but you can't modify it or share it.
Oh, and this falls more in the realm of personal preference, but the deliberate lack of customizability is a real pain in the ass.
4/10 OS, only slightly better at disguising its capitalist greed than Apple.
Microsoft has been building the O365 platform to lock out competitors and locking users into an ecosystem that is difficult to leave. They systematically eliminate competition and have pushed to create laws that make competition harder. In embrace extend extinguish, they are in phase 3, which is a massive red flag. They also started putting out spyware and malware into their software and have proven they can't maintain security; making them a bad actor in a position of power. Scale is debatable, but Microsoft is undeniably evil in 2024.
my favorite bit was how no one at microsoft actually understood their own licensing pricing. for decades, you could call microsoft for pricing and get different answer from people in cubicles next to each other or even from your own rep.
it was as if they were making it up as needed.
How bad is Microsoft?
Yes
Microsoft abuses their de facto monopoly to engage in gross invasion of their users' privacy, and continues to try to wrest their users' control of their system from them by altering system settings after updates, and making some settings nearly impossible to change. And that's to say nothing of MS's attempts to turn their operating system into and advertising platform.
How bad is Microsoft?
Bad enough to be stay away from
Microsoft is about as bad as any other proprietary software company. They do some good things for the open source economy, but they also mistreat their users.
I think it's a mistake to look at the free software movement as being a reaction against Microsoft or Google. It's against the proprietary software world in general.
Maybe I'm going crazy but I feel like I've been seeing this post or an identical one for many days, maybe even a week, yet the age is still one day.
Still, fuck MS and all.
Yes. During the entire history of MSDOS, Windows and Internet Explorer, there are so many things you can pick why Microsoft is bad. Now they even integrate Recall into Windows. I want to say that I always disconnected Xbox from Microsoft; and I'm not entirely sure why.
The question of this post is a bit misleading, because it implies that someone could answer with "no". Better question (in my opinion) is "How bad is Microsoft?".
As a shareholder (which I'm not), it's absolutely amazing.
As a human being though... it's simple to look at the history of the company, from its inception based on nepotism and locking-down was hitherto the common good, to going from one place of monopoly (OS, app, cloud) to another (extending to whatever is trendy at the moment e.g XR with HoloLens, AI with OpenAI, etc).
It's IMHO one of the very worst thing that could have happened to humanity in terms of cognitive empowerment. Apple is not far behind but in terms of locking up an entire ecosystem but Microsoft, sadly, is doing it better.
To clarify what I mean is that Microsoft is the business embodiment of learned helplessness. Most people would shrug at the quality of software they provide, the price, etc ONLY because they are convinced, wrongfully so, that they are is no legitimate alternative. If users were actually able to chose, not being coerced into but properly chose, by experiencing alternatives, the World would be totally different. Instead of having computer users who feel an adversarial relationship to their devices, we would have a much stronger relation of "this is MY device" the same way a lot (not all) of people have a repair toolbox at home. They know they can try to fix something in THEIR home, even improve it. Most people understand it won't be easy, they might mess it up, but it's possible to try. Not in software, and that's entirely Microsoft "success". Maybe in an alternative reality others, like Apple, would have made that happen to, but in our reality I blame Microsoft, Bill Gates upbringing from his legal mindset father and well connected mother.
We could have a world were users own their devices, have a challenging yet empowering relationship to technology, starting with software, and instead we have exploitative learning helplnessness. So yes, Microsoft is that bad.
I don't think about Microsoft at all mostly. I supported their stuff professionally in the past and friends/family but otherwise total avoidance. They own some big game studios so I probably use some of their products like Minecraft but I haven't used their operating systems or applications for decades and I dislike and distrust cloud services and theirs is no exception. All big companies tend to be the same. Try not to depend on any of them.
Undoubtedly
I don't think the world is black or white. Of course Microsoft can make bad choices and prioritize profit, but Microsoft isn't a person or and entity. MS is an enterprise driven by people that work there.
Linux community or any other community can also make bad choices, afterall it's also people-driven and people are flawed.
I don't excuse MS for really bad choices, but also don't blame it. I just think that's better to see the world complex as it is, not by judging stuff as 'bad' or 'good'.
Michaelsoft is literally the devil
Microsoft has basically taken almost all businesses in the world hostage.
Once your staff is trained on MS products and your own stuff is fully connected to Azure, you're trapped and they can adjust prices to just below what you can bear.Microsoft doesn't need a monopoly in the dying consumer desktop market anymore. That's why they're the top contributor to the Linux kernel, integrated a Linux layer into their OS, offer to save documents in an open format in Office, and host articles on how to install Linux in their documentation.
The year of the Linux desktop has finally come. Everyone who doesn't still run Windows 7, now has a Unix system installed on their PCs (and all other devices). It's just one that's distributed by Google, Microsoft or Apple.
Very bad
There is a lot out there on why from a lot of sources, so definitely not hard to do research on this. Definitely research the history of this company regarding anti-competition, Bill Gate's letter to hobbyists regarding intellectual property and markets (which touches on the whole proprietary vs FOSS suff). You can also just use their products for a while and see for yourself, note what you like and what you don't like (for me the latter is more likely), and make your own judgement.
I personally have no problem with people using Windows but I don't want it shoved down my throat. When people first boot their computer they should have the option to choose what OS to install (Windows, various Linux distros, and FreeBSD) and that choice should always be available in the bios.
What does "bad" means to you exactly? They are the hypocrites just like any big corporation, value only money, they reinvent wheels all the time, but their products pretty good despite being non-free, and making programs is much easier for Windows then GNU/Linux.
It would be even better if they didn't force you to use only their products.
You value simplicity or free of choice and privacy? The "bad" definition depends on it.
Microsoft is evil, but are they more or less evil than Google?
One pet peeve of mine is how in Windows 10 switching between virtual desktops was flawless, and somehow in Windows 11 they fucked it up. At first it had no animation when switching, the taskbar kind of glitches. Now it has an animation but it's kind of delayed and the taskbar still kind of glitches, it seems to reload or something. Kinda crazy honestly
I was curious what the Linux people think about Microsoft
Basically two teams (applied to anyone that are "speaking", e.g writing propaganda blogs, comments, etc; they don't necessary need to have all of this properties, and they may have both teams' properties):
Pro microsoft, pro systemd, pro bsod, pro administrator, pro "security" (privsec.dev pro microsoft edge), pro ms office, pro wine, anti apple/mac, anti (a)gpl, pro .net, pro powershell, .....
anti microsoft, anti windows culture, anti systemd, anti msedge, anti powershell & cmd, anti conio.h, anti bsd/mit/isc, anti company sponsorship ....
Team 3: BSD: receive donation from every entities and work on their clean operating system and software they give everyone for free without restriction; FreeBSD has been looked down by the anti-company anti-apple anti-permissive-licenses clowns
Expressed by Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD): "Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix."
Join team 3!
And, you cannot make the world better by just destroy A company, Microsoft. You must destroy all of them, or don't destroy any, because it can only make the existing company to compete more fierce, and because OpenBSD needs donation from Google, Microsoft, and Meta to keep working on OpenSSH and other great software those companies need! They don't need clowns to look up nor look down them, like when those clown looks down FreeBSD because they received something from Apple that I cannot figure out what.
Worse than theyve been as is most every other massive conglomerate still in business since inception. As the adage goes, power corrupts. Absolutely immutable if the rest of the corporate world is any example
Impossible to know it, there isn't any other corporation who fight with M$, it is a perfect monopoly so it's impossible to figure out a world without it.
My point could be: you can't compare the actual reality to a hypothetical reality because the hypothetical reality isn't real. So how can you know it exactly?
I thought we were well past this topic. I guess everything old is new again. In fact, I'll dust off a classic:
"Bugs fly through open Windows."