not quite as bad as adobe, but they are among the worst

How bad is Microsoft?

Bad enough to be stay away from

Undoubtedly

Yes. During the entire history of MSDOS, Windows and Internet Explorer, there are so many things you can pick why Microsoft is bad. Now they even integrate Recall into Windows. I want to say that I always disconnected Xbox from Microsoft; and I’m not entirely sure why.

The question of this post is a bit misleading, because it implies that someone could answer with “no”. Better question (in my opinion) is “How bad is Microsoft?”.

my favorite bit was how no one at microsoft actually understood their own licensing pricing. for decades, you could call microsoft for pricing and get different answer from people in cubicles next to each other or even from your own rep.

it was as if they were making it up as needed.

It used to be pretty bad, back when it was using all the dirty tricks it could invent to build its monopoly. By now though it’s just obsolete.

I don’t think about Microsoft at all mostly. I supported their stuff professionally in the past and friends/family but otherwise total avoidance. They own some big game studios so I probably use some of their products like Minecraft but I haven’t used their operating systems or applications for decades and I dislike and distrust cloud services and theirs is no exception. All big companies tend to be the same. Try not to depend on any of them.

I feel like the authors of this site may be biased, though.

Is this the circlejerk community of lemmy?

Microsoft is about as bad as any other proprietary software company. They do some good things for the open source economy, but they also mistreat their users.

I think it’s a mistake to look at the free software movement as being a reaction against Microsoft or Google. It’s against the proprietary software world in general.

I like Micsrosofts office suite, but I hate virtually everything else. I got tired of their recent decisions and bought an Apple laptop, partly because I’m getting into iOS development and wanted that experience. But my other computer is dual booted with Fedora and Windows for when I absolutely need Windows, I’ll swap over, bit rarely do I outside of some gaming.

As far as humanity goes, Microsoft and OpenAI might turn out to be the worst companies on earth with the Clearview database being fed to Boston Dynamics war robots and US military goggles. Due to these companies, USA could effectively genocide the entire world as they see fit. This makes the doings of Google and Apple look like a joke in comparison. However, Apple has damaged the society itself via creating capitalism brand cults and teaching this strategy to other brands, entities and people. So Apple has also done horrific things. Google and Apple smartphone generated metadata is regularly used by CIA to commit genocide and assassinations of Muslims and other people.

In short, Western Big Tech and all of NATO/Anglosphere is a big evil for rest of humanity.

I personally have no problem with people using Windows but I don’t want it shoved down my throat. When people first boot their computer they should have the option to choose what OS to install (Windows, various Linux distros, and FreeBSD) and that choice should always be available in the bios.

pretty much.

If you need a point for developers: all public code repositories hosted on GitHub are harvested, at least in 2021, and used to train copilot regardless of their license. Furthermore, GitHub is OWNED by Microsoft now.

I would argue that all companies are bad. But Microsoft specifically abuses their de facto monopoly to engage in gross invasion of their users’ privacy, and continues to try to wrest their users’ control of their system from them by altering system settings after updates, and making some settings nearly impossible to change. And that’s to say nothing of MS’s attempts to turn their operating system into and advertising platform.