Microsoft has a history.
From former employees, I know that the culture at that time and into the late 90's was that Microsoft employees were a better class of human being than non-employees. Knowing that, it's not surprising to see the amount of Us vs Them behavior that showed up as anything from active antagonism to malicious neglect.
The kids don't remember that time frame, and wonder why the old farts malign Microsoft. It's because they went out of their way to make malice look like incompetence. That sort of malignancy deserves not to be forgotten.
It's as if your kids only know Uncle Phil as a Born-Again Christian but you still remember him as a raging alcoholic and how Aunt Sue always had a black eye, or as the guy who molested you when you were a kid. Are you just supposed to forget that ever happened? You accept his apology (except MICROSOFT NEVER EVEN APOLOGIZED), enjoy him while you can but you still have to be on guard in case he falls off the wagon.
1) Windows is still closed source, their OpenDocument support is broken, and Secure Boot gives them an amount of power incomparable to anyone else in the industry: https://nudgedelastic.band/2016/01/i-am-still-not-buying-the...
2) DirectX 12 is Windows Store exclusive and it will never be possible to use DX12 apps on e.g. Wine: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/microsoft...
3) Patents: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3042699/open-source-tools/m... http://www.infoworld.com/article/2841412/open-source-softwar... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890580
Of course, all of these things are legal.
If 1990s Microsoft did something seemingly anti-competitive, it probably was intentionally anti-competitive. If 2010s Microsoft does something seemingly anti-competitive, while it still might be by intention, I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume it is the unintentional side effect of an innocent (even if misguided) decision.
Ok
> If 2010s Microsoft does something seemingly anti-competitive, while it still might be by intention, I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume it is the unintentional side effect of an innocent (even if misguided) decision.
That's fine with me. But the degree to which MS has abused its monopoly position in the past, the degree to which they have been found guilty of bribery (in very recent times) in order to push MS products where Linux would have been a viable (and more sensible) alternative (for instance: http://www.intellinews.com/former-romanian-minister-admits-t... , there are plenty of other examples), the Windows 10 privacy violations, the crippling of Skype on Linux and so on make me believe that there are still at least some parts of MS that have not changed all that much.
Their fall from the heights since then has allowed me to ignore whatever malfeasance they committed in the late 2000's or early 2010's, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
And for what it is worth, what they did to companies I worked for in the late 90's and early 2000's consisted of lying, cheating and stealing. It consisted of blatantly dishonest and illegal behavior. And it was completely institutionalized so that the default behavior was dishonest and malicious.
You can be wonderfully forgiving and credulous, but I personally find it very hard to do so.
It takes a long time for a company to recover from a toxic management team even after they are gone. Some never do.