Microsoft information
It is my opinion that Microsoft Corporation produces poor quality products.
They then use unscrupulous marketing techniques to sell them at vastly
inflated prices. These techniques include:
- False advertizing and other public statements with known errors.
- Licensing agreements that prohibit posting benchmarks.
- Large payouts to computer industry magazines. These are usually
disguised as advertizing fees.
- Early release of programs known to contain numerous bugs, but with no
disclosure of the known faults.
I feel Microsoft engages in unethical competitive practices. The US
Justice Department, the US courts, the State Attorney Generals of 24
states, and the European Union agree. Examples include:
- Deliberately imbedding code in their products to break competing products.
- Attempting illegal deals with competing companies.
- Deliberately selling a product below cost (dumping) for the sole purpose
of driving a compeditor out of business.
- Deliberately designing their software to lock users in, making it
difficult to try alternatives.
- Reserving important application programing interface (API) elements
for Microsoft internal developers, so third party applications
cannot take advantage of them.
- Ignoring anti-trust orders.
Perhaps the most pernicious peice of misinformation Microsoft promotes is
that there are no alternatives to their products. They have been so
successful at selling this idea that many IT executives accept it as
axiomatic. Twenty years ago they felt the same way about IBM mainframe
technology.
The truth is there are many alternatives to Microsoft's software. Most of
them are more powerful, more reliable, and much cheaper.
- microsoft's misbehaviour:
- Microsoft's Corporate Conduct
- Microsoft's new Anti-Spyware deletes Norton Anti-Virus
- The remedy vanishes? an article about how the US anti-trust decision has had no effect on curbing MS's misbehaviour
- Europe Plays Hardball with Microsoft
- Europe: Microsoft still out of compliance
- readings
- Microsoft Versus an excellent analysis of Microsoft's practices.
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar Probably the most famous article explaining the Open Source Software movement.
- An interview with Bill Gates (Microsoft CEO) about bugs in their software
- Microsoft exposure sites
- Boycott Microsoft
- KMFMS
- The Unix vs NT Organization
- alternatives
- BSD
- Linux
- Sun Microsystems
- humor
- A humorous comparison of Microsoft's Tech Support vs the Psychic Friends Network