Why I disike Microsoft So Much
People often wonder and even make fun of me for my dislikes for several of the big giants in the tech industry. Oracle, Google/Meta, Facebook and not least Microsoft.
As I get older and more introspective about life, one thing is clear. I am still very much a militant when it comes to how the world works. I have come to understand one of the few ways a person can make a diffrence is with their pocketbook, or how they spend their money. There are social and political reasons I do not want my family spending money at Chic-fila or Hobby Lobby. I at a very basic level hate their view and stance against LGBTQ+ people.
What the hell does that have to do with Microsoft? There are a lot of ancient history of what has gone on in this industry that it seems that no one remembers. Maybe I am just an autistic fool, but I remember things done and said years ago that to me shows exactly what Microsoft was founded on. For those of us in the nerdy persuasion I think Master Yoda said it best:
- Sith Lords, there is always two, never more, never less. Always two.
Gates and Allen created their first company Traf-O-Data which sold computer software to track automobile traffic data. Allen suggested, after seeing the Altair computer on the cover of the Janauary 1975 Popular Electronics, that they could write a BASIC interpreter for it. Gates called up MITS, the company behind the Altair, and LIED to them saying they had a working interpreter for BASIC. First of a long line of lies to the world from Gates. They quickly wrote the interpreter and successfully demonstrated it in March of 1975. Give the two devils their due, they wrote it from scratch in 3 months or so. MITS agreed to distribute the compiler and in April they founded Microsoft. Founded on a total lie.
The funny one to me is that they entered the operating system business in 1980 with a version of UNIX that was named Xenix. As much as they have over the years complained and badmouthed Uhix/Linux, they got their foot in the door with Unix. They ended up with a contract with IBM to take a product IBM bought, 86-DOS, from Seattle Computer Products. So they did not write DOS, they took a version of DOS written by someone else and made their millions selling it. At that time Allen developed cancer and had to step down. Allen said that Gates wanted to water down his shares of Microsoft because "he wasn't working hard enough". Shows what a good person Gates is NOT. Allen was supposedly his best friend.
Now becomes an issue where I really start to have issues with their business practices. Microsoft was helping IBM develop IBM OS/2. A year and two months after "helping" IBM with OS/2, they released Microsoft Windows. Even the government thought it was suspicious that they were hired by IBM to help create OS/2, yes released their own GUI desktop a year later. FTC charged Microsoft with collusion. IBM OS/2 in my opinion was the absolute best OS of the time. I was running numerical modeling in my Environmental consulting job on OS/2. My co-workers couldn't understand why I could take the exact same computer as them, they had Windows 3.1 on it, I had OS/2 on mine, and I would run about 2x the number of simulations that they were able to. OS/2 was basically destroyed by marketing and Microsoft. That and in my opinion more stupidity and incompetence on the part of IBM.
Microsoft had the copy of OS/2 that they originally helped write, so they took that copy and relied heavily on it to develop Windows NT. So again, they used something that another company paid them to build to create a new product. Again, in my opinion, a little slimy. But pretty much the Bill Gates playbook.
Browser Wars. None of you probably have a clue to what that was. Microsoft backed into the operating system their inernet browser Internet Explorer(IE). There was another company named Netscape that had developed a much better browser, Netscape Navigator. Microsoft hates competition, so they did everything in the world to try to destroy the market share Netscape had aquired. Microsoft suddenly make IE free, tried all kinds of pressure on partners and everyone to NOT allow Netscape to survive. I still have somewhere in my files my copy of my $35 purchase of a license to Netscape. My way of supporting stopping Microsoft. It was probably 1996 or so when I bought it, right in the middle of the browser war. You know the ancestor of Netscape, or as it is called today, FireFox. I am not going to try to find all the stupid stuff they did to try to destroy Netscape, you can find it all on the internet if you are intested.
Now Microsoft's main revenue product is their office suite, Microsoft Office. They managed to write a lot of really good software there, right? welll....... Not really. The first office product released by Microsoft was actually developed by former Xerox programmers, Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie. Microsoft hired them and acquired their "Multi-Tool Word". It ran on UNIX systems. So they redid it to run on PCs and Word was born.
Well they have Excel with is a solid spreadsheet, right? Well, the origin of Excel is called MultiPlan, a very popular program for CP/M. When Lotus 123 and Quatro Pro took over the spreadsheet market, Microsoft took Multiplan and rewrote it to run on Windows and released it in 1988. So no they didn't write Excel, they took a different product and made Excel.
Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program,[7] created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin[7] at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released, became instantly popular and Microsoft bought the company to get PowerPoint.
Visio originated in the 1990s as a product of Shapeware Corp. In 2000 Microsoft bought it and made it a part of their Office Suite. At the time there was some bad press on the tactics that Microsoft used to strongarm them into selling Visio to them. Microsoft does not take no, or let something they want get away. They don't care who they destory to do it.
The last two really big issues I have with Gates and Microsoft, starts with Windows ME(Windows Mistake Edition) and the subsequent release of XP. ME was a complete cluster and a black eye for Microsoft. It had major issues with network drivers, crashing, it was hard to see students at the University of Utah, where I worked at that time, to try to use their laptops. Then they released XP. Now, XP as a huge improvement and worked much better than ME. So what is my issue with it? There was publicly over 10k known bugs and issues with it the day it was released. AND they set sales records with it, probably a lot of it people stuck with ME. What other company on this planet can release a buggy product with 10k known errors, and still set a sales record? ONLY MicroCrap can do that due to their stranglehold on the computer industry. At this point the only OS competitors was MAC OS and those toys, Linux and BSD.
The second and my real gripe with the liar Gates is the entire SCO Lawsuit. They funneled a lot of money to SCO to help them. Bought a ton of their bogus SCO licenses as a way to funnel money to McBride and his company. Gates had testified publicly (I am still hunting for the copy of the exact transcript, but Gates has been investigated and drug before comittees so many times that I haven't found it yet), he publicly testified that shareware/open source/free software was a danger to our nation. Basically he claimed that open source would destroy all the companies that were in the software industry. What he saw was competition. And as stated, Gates hates competition. If it cost him millions to stomp out a company, he is ok with that. Microsoft has spent years and years telling the world that Linux is bad, substandard, etc. Now Microsoft is using Linux on Azure and making noises about writing their own Linux. Which is the huge punch to the gut for all of us who spent years working to keep open source going. They have never been ethical or truthful.
Bottom line, over the years, since the 80s I have seen firsthand the tactics and the bogus propoganda they keep spinning. Attacking Open Source, willing to run anyone who stands up to them out of business, etc. When Allen stepped down due to cancer, the second sith was promote to full blown sith and Steve Ballmer was promoted to the role. I guess I am a romantic at heart. I really believe that people should treat others with respect and dignity. I will not work for, or support if I can help it, any company I do not align with their methods and products. If Microsoft disappeared tomorrow I would have a huge drink of some nice Tillamoor Dew Irish Whiskey. So if you care, or want to make fun of me, here was the one page dissertation on the highlights of why I don't like them. If you want a much more in depth discussion of ancient history, hit me up.