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.
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.
The backslashes were actually IBM’s fault. MS DOS 2.0 README