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).
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).
I think the entire Bill Gates section can be omitted, when he’s had nothing to do with Microsoft for a long time now. Even if you hate him, there’s no point elaborating about him when this is an essay on Microsoft, and not Bill Gates. You could mention him briefly at the beginning of the article saying how he was the co-founder, but that’s all that would be relevant. Everything else should be written from the perspective of Microsoft, even if Bill Gates was the person behind that action, because once again, you’re writing an essay about a company.
Bill Gates still owns around 0.9% of Microsoft, which is a lot for such a big company. (edit: which makes him the fourth mayor shareholder source)
I get your point and maybe the Bill Gates part should be it’s own thing. Thanks for your feedback, I’ll talk about it with my friend.
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).
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.
Because I have to use Teams.
maybe you just hate your coworkers? :)
No, it’s definitly just the software. I miss slack.
- The disaster that was Vista (increased system requirements, “vista capable” lawsuit)
- Trusted computing controversy
- Secure boot
- Decision to remove the Start button in Windows 8
- UWP apps - about how bloated they are
- Replacement of lightweight win32 apps to bloated UWP (eg Sticky Notes, Notepad, Photo Gallery etc)
- The new Settings applet and the deprecation of the old Control Panel
- Complete removal of certain Control Panel applets, with no GUI replacements
- Deep integration of Explorer.exe from Windows 8 onwards, making it near-impossible to have a complete shell replacement (affecting the third-party shells such as BlackBox)
- Locking down of OS features in the name of “security” (eg requiring a hack to apply custom themes)
- Aggressive nagging to upgrade to Windows 10 (including forced upgrades)
- Windows Update: specifically, how it hijacks your PC
- Windows Update can sometimes remove Linux as a bootable option
- Lack of a rolling release model
- Aggressive telemetry and user data collection
- Increased bloatware and unwanted features
- Ads in Start Men and File Explorer
- Print Nightmare bug mismanagement
- Bug that caused the deletion of user documents
- Microsoft Pluton
- Forcing new Windows users to sign in with a Microsoft Account, requiring a hack to use local accounts
- The constant push towards Microsoft cloud services, which are not only a privacy nightmare but have hidden costs and is unreliable (eg frequent outages, lack of troubleshooting features, clunky)
- Microsoft Intune sucks and isn’t a replacement for SCCM, in spite of them claiming otherwise
- Constant product renames (eg: SCCM > MECM, Azure AD > Entra ID etc)
- Forcing driver apps to be distributed and updated via Microsoft Store
- Microsoft Store
- Artificial TPM and CPU requirements for Windows 11 (planned obsolescence)
- Removal of useful features from Window 11 (eg: taskbar customisation options)
- Forced integration of services such as Teams
- Fake Bing ads targeting Chrome users, pushing Adware/PUP
- Malware-like popups in Windows 11 for Bing
- Microsoft Teams (specifically: it’s UI, and how bloated it is)
- Claiming that .NET MAUI is cross-platform, when you can’t build Linux apps with it
- Microsoft PowerShell on Linux is a joke
- Lack of Microsoft Office for Linux, in spite of Microsoft claiming to love Linux
- Lack of VBA support in Office 365 browser apps
- Limited BIOS features in Surface Laptops
- Microsoft support is horrible, even their premium enterprise support sucks
- Microsoft News Portal posting factually-incorrect, AI generated articles
SCCM > MECM, Azure AD > Entra ID etc
Wait… I’m only 3 years into it. Is SCCM the direct predecessor of AAD/EID? I follow the SCCM group on Reddit because they usually have good opinions on updates, but have never understood what the fuck they actually did.
No, AD is the predecessor of AAD. SCCM is the “predecessor” of Intune, or at least that’s what some camps at Microsoft want you to think. Oh wait, I forgot that they also renamed MECM to MCM now.🤦
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
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.
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.
GitHub is a great thing but oss being mostly hosted on a Microsoft platform gives me chills.
I Selfhost.
this is just what I was looking for, thank you!
Ugly, clunky, inelegant.
Windows = designed by engineers.
Mac = engineered by designers.
What makes you think windows is designed by engineeres? I suppose you mean software engineers with that. I’d think that Linux is the system designed by engineers.
They kneecapped Linux in the early days because they were afraid of what people accepting FOSS as a standard would do to their profits.
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).
Vscode is not bad, but the pinnacle if textediting is neovim. That’s a war for another thread, greetings emacs guys.
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.
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this is useful, thanks!
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!
