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Comment by eam | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is a great company, I don't know why a lot of people dislike them. Look at their track record, look at the numbers they're impressive. Perhaps it's jealousy, who knows? Sure they have done several mistakes along the way ahem ie6... But you know what, at the end what matter is the profits. I don't know why people bash on them for their closed source technologies. They're here to make money, if they wanted to give away everything they would have been a charity not a business! You might as well go bash on coke, their ingredients are "closed source." In order for a taco truck to make money they got to sell their tacos, can't give them away now can they? In a nutshell all you who hate Microsoft, find a better reason to hate them. You can't say ie9, because it's beginning to look like it'll be an awesome browser for users and developers alike. End rant. Sorry if this is a little off topic. :)

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You might be too young to remember the days when MS ruled with an iron fist. When they got IBM to use their DOS, they structured the licensing so that the only affordable one was to pay MS for every box that went out the door, no matter which OS was on it. So a shop could either sell only MS-DOS, or not offer it at all, and any shop that didn't offer it couldn't stay in business, once IBM "approved" of MS-DOS.

When they came out with any software, they chose the most confusing name possible. "Windows" was a generic term for any the panes in windowing GUI, until MS appropriated the word. Then came "Word", which sounded like about all the competition out there. Once they had the OS market sewn up, they used that to make their other software work better than anyone elses, with undocumented APIs. Then they offered "bundles" which meant, if you used their OS, which of course every business had to, you couldn't afford to turn down their other offerings. This might sound like fair, tough competition, but the reality was that they used their money and clout to run the competition out of business, then their de facto monopoly to make a fortune.

And tough but fair, often gave way to threats. If a retailer didn't play ball, getting rid of competition, they would pull their joint marketing/advertising deals. If a small business came up with anything interesting, they'd swallow it, or run it out of business by any means necessary. This did more to stifle innovation for about 15 years than anything else.

This is only the beginning of why people don't like MS. If we were to all post here, it would become an encyclopedia.

Wow. You are completely misinformed and, I suspect, just trolling (and presuming to instruct others) based upon events you had no connection with and only understand second-hand from others. By the way, your allegation that Microsoft "stole all the simple-sounding names" is just laughable. I'd dissect the rest of your argument but frankly, I got tired of swatting flies like you years ago. The only accurate statement in your entire rant? MS-DOS. And even that's slanted.

He is not.If you think he is the misinformed person is you.

You can inform yourself.Search for DRDOS.Search for windows trademark issues,lindows, you know what? they were an entire line of windows branded products before MS, MS destroyed them all, you can search what happened to them.

Windows is a generic word, it can't never be trademarked(unless you are rich to get over the law), that applies to "word", "powerpoint", "project", "excel", "exchange". A word in the English dictionary just can't be trademarked, by law.

Maybe you were a kid then, but there was a time when "word" was not the most used word processor, it was "WordPerfect", and people used Lotus123 instead of "excel". What did MS did? They made windows but didn't let WordPerfect and Lotus123 people(and everybody else, like compiler builders) use the windows API, so MS had a 4 year period of advantage. Once they did, the high level exposed API was slower than what MS used.

I'm tired too. When people don't know they don't know what they don't know.

Well, not quite. Lindows certainly wasn't around before MS. According to Wikipedia the company was founded in 2001. Edit: On further reading, Microsoft didn't manage to force them to change over in court - they just paid $20 million and Lindows changed over. Hardly "destroyed" them.

Windows is an English word, however that doesn't mean it doesn't enjoy some trademark protection in an arrangement like "Microsoft Windows". The protection is not as significant as it would be on an invented word (like, say, "Microsoft") but it's still there if you come up with something that's judged to be similar enough to cause confusion.

Similarly, try founding an IT company called Apple and see how far you get - that's an English word too.

And the nerds will tear down their walls with the cry of "REMEMBER STACKER" in their throats.

And CP/M-86, and DR-DOS, and GEM, Geoworks...

IIRC Gary Kildall special on The Computer Chronicles show mentioned the case when DR agreed with IBM to bundle CP/M-86 on IBM PCs only to discover IBM set the price of MS-DOS at $40 and CP/M-86's at $240...

If nerds ever tear down MS's walls, it will be well deserved.

http://www.archive.org/details/GaryKild

Beyond being convicted of abusing their monopoly, Microsoft has a long history of pulling dirty tricks on its competitors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

http://grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history

http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2007/02/microsoft_dirty_...

Apple has been doing way worse things and nobody (of importance) seems to care.

In the 1990's Microsoft forced every computer vendor to pay them for a DOS license regardless of whether they shipped DOS on the PC (did this apply to Windows?) They basically killed any chance of a competing OS in the PC world (4DOS, Quarterdeck, BeOS, Unix, OS/2). The US govt eventually forced them to stop this practice, but it was too late by then. Competition all dead.

Another example, they built the browser into the operating system, thus killing of Netscape. Once they did that they let IE stagnate for several years, providing no innovation (IE6 is 2001). We are finally crawling out of that hole. IE9 is going to be good because it has competition and Microsoft now must compete or see further erosion in their browser market share.

In short, because Microsoft has a desktop monopoly (90% for 15 years), and they've used it aggressively, they make people a bit unhappy. Personally, I don't care if people choose to use Windows, but many people don't want to, yet they must because of "corporate standards."

The only other thing that bugs me is people always want the govt to look into Apple and Google. Everyone seems to have forgotten that Microsoft still has this huge 90% market share. If it could be reduced to 70%, for example, everyone would benefit, including Microsoft users. What's the reason to go after a couple of "small" fish nipping at the heals of Microsoft?

I'm with Steve Jobs (from back in the day):

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.... I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success — I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products."

Microsoft seems to be working on it. They are pushing design HARD for their devs. Silverlight and WPF were designed with design in mind. I went to Mix a couple years ago and half the sessions there dealt with design or user experience in some way.

Their hardware is not shabby either...zune, xbox 360 (well hardware quality aside), mice, keyboards.

>> Sure they have done several mistakes along the way ahem ie6

IE6 is not a mistake. It's old. It first come with Windows XP and Windows XP is 8 years old. At the time, IE6 was fine.

It depends what part of the process yor're referring to. IE6's initial development wasn't a mistake. But disbanding the IE specific development team, abandoning all platforms that weren't windows and not updating it for years and years were mistakes and all those things happened in the era of IE6

Disbanding of the team appears to have a lot to do with the anti-trust cases though.

Yep, this always bugs me too. When it came out it had quite a good rendering engine compared to most (all?) competitors.

The problem arose from Microsoft disbanding the IE team and not releasing a new version for so many years. It fell behind from age.

Microsoft wanted ppl to develop Win32/.NET apps, not Web stuff. So no reason to improve IE 6.

this might shed some light on how M$ used to play:

http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html

If you ever want to be taken seriously, grow up and knock it off with the childish M$ stuff.

Yeah, at least go for the good old Micros~1

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