I don't like MS very much, but you have to try to see it from their side. They are not a charity foundation, they are a business. As such, their primary goal must be to make money. If people start using Linux, they lose money. So they try to beat it and win the customers.
That's fine and dandy. Where they start getting on my nerves is here:
Instead of trying to make a better product, they instead resort to lies, control, and the consumer's ignorance. Maybe that method is cheaper, and maybe it would work to drive out a tradidtional competitor, but it won't work with Linux, because Linux is not competing for money. You can't make it "go out of business" because no matter how many people use it, it makes $0. What I wish is that MS would instead try to make a better product. That is the whole point of competition. A favorite quote of mine:
"Fools compete to beat eachother. The wise compete the strengthen eachother."
Maybe MS will see this sometime. Or maybe some other OS that does (and makes money) will and will crush MS beneath it's feet.
So I don't really think they are evil, just stupid control freaks.
In the end, my biggest problem with MS is not that they produce cheap (quality wise), fragile glass, but that there are so many people who have inherited MS's mentality that "Windows is all" and don't care whether something is compatible. This mainly stemms from my frustration against Internet Explorer, but it applies to other things as well. Like how things require Windows. Or that, when asked about what operating system they use, they think you mean what version of Windows. My mom actually didn't believe me when I told her I was going to buy a computer with a blank harddrive.
***mini-rant comming up****
I'll briefly explain my beef with IE for those who don't know for themselves.
IE doesn't handle CSS correctly. There are standards that browsers should follow, but MS chooses to ignore them. That in itself doesn't bother me. If they want to be dumb, its their problem. But since everyone uses Windows, and most of them use IE, the majority of web-users use a faulty browser. That means that they see sites coded perfectly as broken. Also, many code sites so they will work in IE, which means they are broken elsewhere. So it comes down to either A. Supporting IE, B. Supporting others, or C. Trying to do both. And it's not just that, but IE is way out of date too. It doesn't just interpret CSS wrong, but it doesn't understand much of it. So by making my site work in IE, I have to use out of date and broken code. If I don't, the IE users think it is "broken," when they are using the broken software. And by using IE, they perpetuate this, because people will continue to code for IE as long as it's at the top, and people will continue using it as long as they are ignorant and most pages are aimed towards it.
I have given up on IE, and don't even try to support it when I work on my webpage. I have no idea how my site looks in it (probably distorted), but I don't really care. If they don't care enough to use a decent browser, then I don't care enough to make my site look nice for them. Fortunately, I haven't tried anything fancy yet, but when I do, I'll likely lose many potential viewers. Oh well. They're really the ones missing out, not me. I make no gain by them visiting my site. By not, they could save me money, because I'd need less bandwidth
Huh. That wasn't very brief. Oh well.