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.

  • Riskable@programming.devEnglish
    7·
    10 months ago

    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).

  • dan1101@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    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?

  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago
    • 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
    • 1st@kbin.social
      0·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        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.🤦

  • Peanut@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    3·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • PlexSheep@feddit.deEnglish
    3·
    10 months ago

    I don’t particularly hate MS (yet), but I hate some aspects of it.

    I hate windows. I’m not even sure if I’m objectively right but it does not even matter. GNU/Linux is just a superior software system. I hate how Windows is not Linux and find most things they do different stupid. I’m not going to make an exhaustive list here, but for starters:

    • Windows, especially before 11, is so ugly. On Linux I can install themes, fancy WMs, entire DEs, etc etc. MacOS is famously overdesigned, never used but from what I hear it seems good too.

    • Windows does not support links. They have some weird thing, but it’s not the beauty of Symbolic and Hardlonks on Unix like systems.

    • Backslash in paths. Come on. And yes I know regular slashes work most of the time nowadays, but the default is just bad.

    • Multiple roots. C: D: and so on. Probably an okay design choice, but I like the UNIX way better.

    • No central package Manager. There is windows store, and it’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not the same as apt, dnf, pacman and so on. Installing things is just annoying, every time.

    • Terminal sucks on windows. I hate PowerShell with it’s weird verbose syntax. Installed programs are most often not usable and I have to manually add them to PATH. Common things, like ctrl-d for EOF does not work.

    There is probably much more than that. I find windows to just be a bad OS. And this is subjective, I know. Some people don’t care, some even like windows better for some reason. It’s probably not as bad as I feel it is.

    Here is another completely h related thing: Microsoft naught Rare, a software studio that developed games for Nintendo. And oh boy, what games. During the N64 era, they made timeless classics like banjo kazooie, until MS bought them and drove them against the wall.

    • OfficerBribe@lemm.eeEnglish
      32·
      10 months ago

      As a Windows user for quite some time, I have couple comments about some statements.

      Windows does not support links

      Do you mean these things or it’s something else?

      Multiple roots. C: D: and so on.

      If you have 1 disk, it will be just C:, partitioning is not really a thing anymore for most. And if you have multiple disks, doesn’t UNIX separate each (I think they were called devices /dev/ or something like that)? And if you want, you can put multiple physical disks under 1 logical partition so you end up with 100TB of C:\

      No central package Manager

      There’s a new native thing called winget. There are also 3rd party options like Chocolatey.

      Terminal sucks on windows

      New Windows Terminal is pretty good. There are also 3rd party options like ConEmu.

      I hate PowerShell with it’s weird verbose syntax

      It is logical and easy to understand without memorizing some arcane strings. There are also aliases that even match UNIX commands like ls or man, but using those is bad practice unless you do some quick thing interactively.

      All in all, if someone grows up with specific OS, they will probably prefer that OS and when comparing it with another one, try to do same operations same way as on their primary OS ending up with bad experience.

      • PlexSheep@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago
        • Links

        Cool that they have that. Why is there no cliggidy click option to quickly make one? I’d also just take an ln command.

        • Multiroot

        On Linux at least, the dev directory contains the actual devices. It’s not where they are mounted and accessible. Everything is a file on UNIX, so this is where the physical device is, as opposed to its contents.

        • wt

        I know and use wt at work. It’s pretty okay, but a major issue that I have with it is that it scales italics weird (at least with FiraCode NF). Also no custom or vim keys for the mark mode thing. For me, kitty is the most usable terminal, and there is no alternative for windows which does everything right (for me, or that I have found).

        • pwsh

        I won’t step down on this one. Shells are made to be used interactively, and PowerShell feels like coding in C#. It’s good that they have some aliases, but that’s not enough.

        Also, new software needs to be added to PATH manually, completion sucks compared to zsh with minimal plugins. Controlling a pwsh session just feels bad.

        I’m probably still biased. It’s good if you’re okay with windows, you got less to worry about I suppose. I just really dislike it, and WI does dislikes me back.

        • OfficerBribe@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          Links

          There probably is some shell extension that could add this in context menu. In Windows you use mklink or New-Item commands. Links are not really popular in Windows environment, I would say an absolute majority do not even know about them or never think about them. Shortcuts are the ones that people generally use.

          Shells are made to be used interactively, and PowerShell feels like coding in C#

          I can accept a compromise of slightly more verbose and standardized syntax for interactive use when compared with unix/linux and ability to easily automate pretty much everything you can in Windows / Microsoft ecosystem. I am not a professional coder, but I thoroughly enjoy scripting in PowerShell for work and private tasks.

          Also, new software needs to be added to PATH manually

          True, that’s just how Windows programs work. Executables probably will never be available from shell as they can be from Linux without manual tinkering. Start menu is essentially the alternative here. For those couple programs I need to be easily lauched from terminal, adding paths to PATH variable does not seem too much of an problem.

      • GigglyBobble@kbin.social
        1·
        10 months ago

        winget is a poor excuse of a package manager, misses lots of applications, doesn’t handle OS updates and AFAIK also no dependencies.

        WSL is Linux on crutches since the file IO is done with the subpar Windows API and bloated NTFS killing one of Linux’ most effective performance advantage (it runs much faster in vm on Windows even). It’s basically the reverse of Wine which makes some Windows applications run even faster than on Windows itself.

        if someone grows up with specific OS, they will probably prefer that OS and when comparing it with another one

        Cannot say anything about probability but I grew up with DOS and Windows (starting from 3.1). I tried Debian in the 90s and hated it. Tried again almost 20 years later and eventually moved all my machines to Linux (Windows 10 telemetry was the last straw). Still use Windows at work though and hate it even more now that I know how smooth a modern OS can run.

    • sir_reginald@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I have sources about this, although I still have to read through them. It’s definitely going into the essay, yeah

  • treefrog@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    Turning my OS into an ad server is at the top of my list. Switched to Linux for everything I can.

  • kubica@kbin.social
    2·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • mPony@kbin.social
    2·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • sir_reginald@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      I had a few things about the 90’s antitrust but I hadn’t seen the edited video evidence. Thanks for the link, appreciated!