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.
Just an innocent movie reference
Kill Bill Gates
the fuck?
it’s a pun with the Tarantino movie. Maybe not totally aproppiate
Inappropriate, IMO. I read it as [discussion of] a desire to murder the actual person.
yeah, I changed it. I don’t want to express desire of murdering anyone, just to take down Microsoft as a company. Thanks
It’s still irrelevant, no? I thought Bill Gates no longer had any role at Microsoft.
normally shareholders have a word on the actions of a company, after all it’s their money that is invested and profits are to be expected.
I don’t perceive that as offensive
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).
Bill Gates is throwing his resources into the #warOnCash (effectively, war on privacy) via his involvement with the betterthancashalliance.org scumbags.
I’ve heard all the charity expenditure is 100% tax avoidance strategy & not a dime more, unlike William Buffet who gets credit for donating more than tax optimums & also getting other billionaires to give more (just a rumor… that bit is beyond me).
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).
When they switched the window exiting x button on the “upgrade to windows ten!” Notification to accept the installation rather than just exit the notification.
I’d been exiting that window every day to set up our work computers, as our point of sales solution didn’t support the newer version of windows.
My horror when our shop doors open and the screen turns to “updating to windows 10”
We basically lost a day of sales since we had to do thing sans POS.
When I told the owner that I definitely didn’t accept the installation, he called Microsoft which told him I must have accepted the installation.
The set the standards, and then break them. They have been doing this since early versions of Office.
They don’t finish porting old applets to new Windows before they release another new Windows.
They unfairly use their market position to push their products and services. Edge, Onedrive, Teams, etc.
Windows Updates, need I continue?
The System applet side by side with the legacy Control Panel sucks so bad. Is that setting here, there, or everywhere? Want to combine task bar icons? Fuck you, we haven’t rewritten that part yet.
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
this is just what I was looking for, thank you!
Turning my OS into an ad server is at the top of my list. Switched to Linux for everything I can.
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!
I hate them because they invented Proprietary Software at a time that all software code was shared between hobbyists and built upon freely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists#Open_letter
this is perfect, thanks!
Ugly, clunky, inelegant.
Windows = designed by engineers.
Mac = engineered by designers.
Embrace, extend, and exterminate, 'nuff said. They can fuck off with their shitty business practices.
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 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.
VS for Mac (the discontinued one) is different from VS Code.
Two things come to mind for me:
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one of the more recent issues I’ve had is the exercise in pain that is Teams for Linux when not using a corporate account
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second is that they looooove to build proprietary products to compete with existing ones in attempts to build their own “standard” that only works on their systems, thus crushing competitors. See: (early) MSOffice, Internet Explorer+ActiveX, DirectX
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Third: buying out products and removing compatibility. RAV antivirus was popular for Linux users as a fileshare/mail/etc scanner. MS bought it and shortly after killed Linux support
this is useful, thanks!
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