I’m helping a friend of mine writing a long essay exposing the abusive, monopolistic and anti-consumer practices of Microsoft. First, we’ve created some sort of table of contents with the different topics we want to cover and now we’re gathering sources for each of these topics.
Microsoft is a huge corporation with a big influence on media and although if you dig enough you can find useful sources, they’ve also made an extremely good job at hiding bad press from search engines.
We’ve scrolled through Hacker News, other links aggregators and sites like TechRights and we’ve found a good amount of articles against Microsoft. But we’re sure there has to be more. So that’s kinda why we’re asking.
Bullet points for the sections we’ve thought of (suggestions are welcome too):
* The Microsoft Monopoly
* Microsoft and the web
* Internet Explorer
* Microsoft Edge
* Microsoft Windows Monopoly
* Microsoft and the Governments
* Education
* Healthcare
* Microsoft Gaming Empire
* Windows Backdoors (not sure where this section belongs)
* Work with the NSA
* Microsoft loves Open Source (microsoft infiltration in foss)
* Microsoft and the OSI
* Github
* Github Copilot
* VSCode
* War on GPL
* Microsoft loves Linux and BSD?
* Embrace, extend, extinguish
* Our lord, Bill Gates
* The media empire
* Twitter censorship
* Bill Gates the philanthropist
* Big Pharma
* Bill and Jeffrey Epstein
Edit: typos and removed the pun “Kill Bill Gates” because it seemed inappropriate.
I’m helping a friend of mine writing a long essay
I think the authorities refer to this as a manifesto after locating it.
an anti-microsoft manifesto? That sounds nice, but I doubt it will ever reach that many people, we’re planning on putting it on a quick website of it’s own and just let it float around the web.
You know that’s not why I said that.
Edit: typos and removed the pun “Kill Bill Gates” because it seemed inappropriate.
Kill Bill Gates
the fuck?
it’s a pun with the Tarantino movie. Maybe not totally aproppiate
Yeah, that’s weird. Outside of Microsoft as a company, Bill Gates has done a lot of good in this world. He isn’t perfect, but he is one of the “better” billionaires (if such a thing exists).
I don’t believe better billionaires are a thing. Bill Gates has done a lot of shady stuff, but he’s incredibly good at covering that up on the media. Anyway, I changed the title of that section because it was inappropriate (even if it was a reference to the movie).
Embrace, extend, and exterminate, 'nuff said. They can fuck off with their shitty business practices.
Do Apple next!
I’d love to, but let’s see how this one turns out first. It’s a lot of work and we haven’t even started writing.
You need a chapter on “Microsoft and Kerberos”. They adopted Kerberos for Active Directory and at the same time literally wrote the Kerberos RFC saying specifically how to use it across a large enterprise.
Then they didn’t implement it that way.
They intentionally made it so that Active Directory doesn’t follow the Kerberos standard they they wrote. So if you follow the standard you won’t actually be compatible with Active Directory. It’s one of their more subtle, “Embrace Extend Extinguish” maneuvers. Most people don’t know about it because the only company impacted at the time was Novell (and they won their legal stuff against Microsoft… with a settlement).
do you happen to have a link? this sounds very much like Microsoft’s tactics yeah
They also killed Atom text editor in favor of VSCode.
In all fairness, VSCode is awesome. And I used to be ABM (Anything But Microsoft).
Yeah but they hide some really useful extensions behind official VSCode with telemetry wall. Other than that it’s a cool editor.
I didn’t have much interest but there was enough hype that I tried it but found it too slow being used to sublime text. I know lots of others like it a lot though.
last I heard though is they are removing the macos version. which would mean that anyone who likes it enough would need to switch from mac, which sounds too convenient for me to be an accident. I don’t know how many would actually make this switch, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m sure there are scenario where development teams are very used to vscode and the ecosystem and perhaps ingrained enough into their workflow that it makes more sense to them to have the team switch to windows to keep using vscode instead of rewriting solutions and/or having the developers spend time to relearn and get up to speed with another editor and plugins etc.
Bill was a big part of how proprietary software became a thing (and not just “a thing”, but “the default”) in the first place. Just think what the world would be like today without that particular form of artificial scarcity.
They kneecapped Linux in the early days because they were afraid of what people accepting FOSS as a standard would do to their profits.
Microsoft submitted video evidence during their Antitrust trial in the late 90’s that had been edited together, but was being presented as unedited. i.e. they tried to pull the wool over the DOJ’s eyes, because why not? https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-on-trial-ms-videotape-not-what-it-seemed/
They included IE4 in Win98 - that was seen as anticompetitive. Compare that to everything they do today. Or everything Apple does today (like, literally everything). It’s shocking that something like including IE with win98 was worth pursuing, but yet everything since then was just how big business does big business.
I had a few things about the 90’s antitrust but I hadn’t seen the edited video evidence. Thanks for the link, appreciated!
Ugly, clunky, inelegant.
Windows = designed by engineers.
Mac = engineered by designers.
old article from 2010 about ms spreading fud http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX
I still remember this specific article and it struck a nerve with me when I first read it.
I’m sure there are much older examples and also much newer examples but this one is always in the back of my head.
latest example I can think of off the top of my head is ms adding their bash compatible terminal or linux subsystem, not sure how it technically works, but it allows running bash scripts and I think linux terminal commands and tools to some extent. which sounds great on the surface for anyone who wants to do this and might bring some value to the eco system, but it makes me scared because I only see ms infiltrating foss and trying to make it their own and reducing the need to use linux at all, and I suspect eventually they will introduce new things that only works on windows and fragment things. even more scary I commented about this on reddit and only got downvotes. I guess I’ll keep all my tinfoil hats for myself and not share with the rest of the class.
another example is xbox trying to buy up every game company and put playstation out of business, with their latest comment being about how they would want to buy up nintendo. I guess technically not ms, but pretty same to me.
awesome, I missed the DirectX conflict. the rest is also useful, thanks!
For me it’s the monopoly. Because of their domination they can push whatever change they want because people is locked in to their services and must accept it.
And well kinda independently I don’t mind vscode that much, but github until a few weeks was able to show much better info on the home page than now.
Meh, hate the game, not the player. I’ve spent half a life and my whole career adjacent to MS, my anger about their products and practices has long since turned to cynical acceptance. Yes, they have over stepped the bounds of fairness and good taste many times, but I’ve seen other vendors do so much worse. If you don’t like Microsoft products, advocate for something else. The bottom of the bottle is that Microsoft has a duty to pursue profit for it’s shareholders, and some of that will be ugly. These days there are workable alternatives for everything they sell, which wasn’t always the case.
Because they killed my boy.
Knifed him. He was just a baby.
Because they keep on releasing Surface devices with less efficient Intel CPUs.
