Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Why We Hate Micro$oft

Did you ever wonder, why "those people" hate Microsoft
If you have, and if you really honestly truly want to gain a better understanding, put down your MS lover hat, and feast your eyes on the following Master-Piece document produced by "The European Committee for Interoperable Systems". The document named  "Microsoft - A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm"

You can read the an introductory article + the full document (scroll down a couple of pages) at

Beware though, it's not a short read. It's more of a week-end type of thing. However, to wet your appetite, here are a couple of quotes

Killing Dr-Dos: The OS monopoly

"The approach we will take is to detect dr [DOS] 6 and refuse to load. The error
message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'"
--Phillip Barrett, Microsoft Windows Development Manager


Killing Word-Perfect: The Office Monopoly

"I have decided that we should not publish these [Windows 95 user interface]
extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration
that will be harder for likes of Notes, WordPerfect to achieve, and which will give
Office a real advantage.... We can't compete with Lotus and WordPerfect/Novell without this."
--Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and then-CEO


Killing Java: The language Monopoly

"[W]e should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take more
advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java
apps."
--Microsoft's Thomas Reardon




That's enough for a teaser :) Enjoy reading the rest of the document