The amount of whitewashing of the telemetry/spyware is disturbing: most MS defenders (as if this rich corporation needs any defense!) keep saying that now they're listing all information they're gathering and allow users to turn it off.
What they're conveniently not saying is how MS completely ignored all customer concerns and moved ahead with their invasive telemetry/spyware, initially didn't list anything thay they were collecting, aggressively changed their implementation in Windows updates to get around telemetry/spyware blockers and didn't allow turning it off.
I have zero trust in the MS of today, they have shown their true colors. The fact that they publish some open source trinkets and say how much they "heart" this or that is almost irrelevant for me.
The stuff they did in the past also matters: trying to derail the open document format standard and killing the Munich Linux project are recent events. They continue to be a bad actor.
which is still not true, random services will keep making mysterious connections no matter wat you disable. Turn of DNSCache and watch svchost query stuff almost every 10-20 minutes.
People don't rip on Microsoft for poor decisions and anti-competitive practices 20 years ago. They rip on Microsoft because the Microsoft ecosystem is a Rube Goldberg-esque shitshow of poorly integrated acquisitions, "features" that basically exist for the sake of causing headaches, and the reality that compelling solutions to problems get sidelined because "nobody ever got fired for going with Microsoft". Vendor lock-in doesn't endear those who have to deal with it to the company holding their business process hostage.
Thank you, it's frustrating constantly being told that there's no good reason to rip on Microsoft today. I don't hate Microsoft out of righteous anger at proprietary software or some grudge from the 90s; Their software sucks today.
It's so disingenuous to say that "oh well Microsoft isn't organized enough to be evil". Mustache-twirling villainy isn't the fear with 2018 Microsoft. The fear is that they'll just ruin things they acquire just like they ruin their own software, and possibly ruin markets they wade into due to their sheer size.
You don't need to be organized to ruin things. You don't even need to be evil.
I've seen a few things recently in this vein, that I should look at Microsoft with new eyes because it hasn't done anything bad lately, as if a few years makes up for three or four decades.
Even if I were to buy that, "We've been on our best behaviour lately" isn't really a great reason to invest time and money in a company's mediocre-at-best products.
This. To me Microsoft has basically become the embodiment of mediocrity in tech. Just about everything they offer, maybe other than Office, is a worse version of a better product by someone else. And they can still rake in profits because most huge corporations are hopelessly dependent on their ecosystem.
In the 90s they were unstoppable and their products unrivaled; but that was a long time ago. I don't care about antitrust 20 years ago, I care about not using terrible products that feel constantly 10 years behind the curve.
I have an odd perspective, because the state of Maine landed some wild kickback-laden deal to supply high schoolers with ibooks in the 2000s.
I hated those machines. I think they were the very first iteration of OSX. They were locked down with annoying, if not very effective Bess proxy software. Nothing was compatible. Safari blew.
Using the old Win95 machine in the computer lab was refreshing. I had the freedom of fucking around with QBasic and then VB6 was envigorating. Then some probably bootleg copies of VC++6 for a year. Completely opened my eyes to all the cool, low-level, hacky shit you could do on windows.
I'm sure it helped that this was pre-steam, where the pirate pc gaming system was a thing. So learning to fix busted windows systems was an everyday thing. Mac... eh, i had one game that had a macos9 version I could get to run (Lords of the Realm 1, i think...)
People are hating on Microsoft because of the shit they are doing now.
Windows 10 and Skype are prime examples, and that is still happening as we speak, as opposed to something that happened years ago.