Is microsoft evil ?

We all hate Microsoft. Few hate because windows hangs too often, others because its slow, and others because its not open source, and others because of its monopolistic “evil” behaviour and others because its rich, and many others because everybody around them hates it. Whatever the reason is, we all simply hate it. But, if we look at the history, we realise if not Microsoft, it could have been much worse.
On its way to success, Microsoft derooted a lot of companies, the major ones that were shook are Apple and IBM. In a way, it is good for the world that Microsoft won over these 2 companies…

Apple makes brilliant innovative products, no doubt about that. The mac, ipod are just too brilliant. But also, apple makes proprietary products just like Microsoft. If not PC, mac would have become the industry standard. We all would have been using mac instead of PCs. Unlike PCs, where the hardware uses open architecture, hardware being manufactured by n different manufacturers assembled together and runs the software produced by some other company, the mac uses a closed hardware architecture, no one other than apple can produce macs and even the software that runs on it is by apple. This does both good and bad. As Apple itself does both - hardware and software, we can expect a better product. But what closed architecture also does is, it keeps the 3rd party computer manufacturers from entering the market. There wouldn’t be dell, compaq etc. There would be Apple, and only apple. The computer industry would have been monopolised more than we can ever imagine. There wouldn’t be any option in the market. Apple would be much bigger than microsoft and more than that, it would have more power to control the industry. With such monopoly we can only guess how worse it would have been.

When IBM decided to make PCs, good for us they chose open architecture(thanks to apple, for pressurising IBM) and built the PCs using 3rd party products. And when it came to operating system, they chose 3 software vendors of which microsoft was one of them. Microsoft bought QDOS(quick and dirty operating system) and made it compatible with PCs.1000s of programs were written on Windows(dos) making it the preferable operating system. Thanks to Bill Gates, the exclusivity of the OS was not given to IBM. When Dell, Compaq and other manufacturers came up with their own version of computers, which were compatible with IBM’s Pcs, they were able to bundle windows with it and sell. Thus making windows the industry standard. And here again had the exclusivity was given to IBM, there would have been 100s of operating systems in the market and would have all sorts of compatibility problem.
Microsoft did indeed play robin-hood, saving the world from worse, even though unintentionally. But after the browser wars of late 1990’s, it started to take the “evil” image. I’m completely against such act, but again it isn’t microsoft alone that is doing this - crushing the competition. Any company with muscle power have done similar acts. Of late even the “do no evil” company - google, launched open social in its attempt to kill facebook apps, unsuccessful till now. Big companies use their muscle power in marketing their new products in an attempt to kill the competition(read small companies). Whether we like it or not, it is the part of any business to use its resources to win over the competition. I really dont get what are we are blaming when we say microsoft is “evil”, are we saying because it uses its muscle power to kill the competition or because it was successful in doing so.

not mine, but came across this intresting article@ http://www.arbitblog.com/2008/06/we_all_hate_microsoft/