There's no coming back from that, and I'll gladly educate newcomers to IT on their ways.

Let them die. The new CEO could be the second coming, you can't fix that cancerous attitude that is entrenched.

They deserve to become obsolete, at the very least.

I don't think I would be able to use any form of technology if I was to hold a grudge for every large company that performed some sort of bad practice, with slave labor to privacy issues.

Luckily people that perform these bad practices will eventually get ousted and replaced, that's when I proceed with caution.

You can wish Microsoft would die, and still use an iPhone.

In fact, much of Apple's success can be attributed to Microsoft fumbling the mobile revolution. In other words, people who use Apple may be doing so directly because of how much worse Microsoft was -- due to Microsoft spending their limited resources on zero-sum tactics like shafting their developer ecosystem.

Compete or die. (Microsoft seems to act like they have a third alternative, monopolize. They're still immensely profitable so it's understandable that their shareholders are comfortable with their current course.)

Part of my current contract is migrating a customer away from SQL Server to Postgres, and it feels good. Automating powershell on aws instances doesn't feel so good, but it's temporary pain.

Typically, if someone hates Microsoft, they love either Apple or Google. That's been my experience at least.

Apple (Worst Offender but also helped Open Source at times)

Microsoft M$ (Middle of the road with it always depending on who you spoke with at the company)

Google (Most powerful of the three in terms of control over people's lives if they wanted it, but I seriously think they stumble ethically not on purpose. I believe they try to follow, "Don't be evil" as a whole)

> Google... stumble ethically not on purpose.

Stumbling? When they ripped off Sun, they did so with deliberately and with awareness at the highest levels. There are emails revealed during the trial that leave no doubt.

Also, of all the companies engaged in all the smartphone patents wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars), Google (via Motorola) was the only company that was actually found guilty of abusing patents: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/4-billion-motorol...

Pretty rich coming from a company that accused everyone else of abusing patents.

> When they ripped off Sun

Than why did Sun's CEO congratulate them? Sun also loves to rip off people look at Oracles' Unbreakable Linux AKA Redhat Linux.

I seriously have 30+ years of Apple hatred from before my Amiga days. Amiga community HATED Apple for their business practices and clear lack of innovation. I went to buy a Mac with my dad when released and my dad say the writing on the wall. Lies and more lies and Lisa wasn't more powerful just more expensive and you still sell those?

How do you explain things like this then?

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-skyhook-emails-2011-5?...

That's exactly what Microsoft is accused of doing.

That they were HUGELY upset that they would lose a data collection stream? Or that they were trying to figure out what to do? Android as a service has requirements or you can make a Fire Phone like Amazon did with the Open Source code of the product doesn't seem like M$.

You can explain what I am missing but the fact that we have Amazon Fire Phone and Fire Tablets all based on a fork of Android seems to kill the implications of these emails.

That said, the Google+ real names insanity removed all my trust in the company's products at that level, and I'm only now considering doing business with them due to their low cost of cloud storage and trusting them at the technical and operational levels more than Amazon.

I think it's wrong to withhold fair consideration for MS products (specifically) just because they did something you think is wrong years ago.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

I would probably agree with that.

From a technology point of view, there are things I love about each company. Microsoft's Azure is pretty neat as is Google's Compute Engine. None of that matters to most people though.

seriously?

But I suppose with Balmer the salesman in charge in between Gates and Nadella they'd avoid sales channel betrayals like that.

If there was a cheaper connection just for the Kin, it would've done reasonably well as a replacement for the Sidekick.

Microsoft's database blunder with the Sidekick less than a year before the Kin's release (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sidekick_data_loss) also contributed, I'm sure, at that time few were willing to trust them with their data. It's a testament to how far Microsoft has come that that's apparently changed with Azure.

In this case, I view Verizon as replying in kind. Which is part of my point, when you treat your peers like s*, there are consequences.

Could you list instances of this? Don't get me wrong, they have been absolute bastards in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i is my go-to example). But keep in mind it is a huge company that has done business with thousands of firms over the past few decades, so to substantiate your point, you would have to produce a pretty big list.

I'm basically asking you, absent either of us going beyond searches like https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+microsoft+crimes ^_^, to trust my observations of these businesses since the fall of 1977 when I started in the field. Heck, I was a great fan of Microsoft until NT 3.51 SP2 (and for a while beyond, it was Vista that completed the job). It was a pattern of behavior that became more and more obvious sometime in the late '90s that changed my opinion of the company, capped with their all out illegitimate assault on Linux and FOSS starting in the early '00s. And I of course don't expect you to take my word for it.

I just don't see it in their peers, not even Oracle.

Ah, here's a different angle: name the healthy peers that are willing to work with Microsoft today, beyond what's absolutely required. Yahoo! fails hard on healthy, Mozilla potentially as hard. I don't understand why/how Yahoo! is still in business, but Mozilla sure seems to be in their endgame (one reason I'm avoiding Rust for the time being).

Yahoo made a number of strategic investments which are very profitable.

You could say they are an investment firm with a small tech-sector arm.

Do you speak ill of banking corporations as often as you do of Microsoft?

Also, if you run Apple hardware at all do yourself a favor and take a look at all the screwed up shit that Apple has done because that company has always been an asshole to just about every entity that they come into contact with.

I don't hate Microsoft today, and only did during the period they posed an existential threat to Linux/FOSS (and it was a relatively gentle sort of hate, made particularly easy by Vista).

I don't run Apple hardware, never have in my life. In part because I count them as worse to users (well, prior to own goals like Vista and Windows 8), but also because as of late they've been behaving particularly bad. Made that decision in 1987, who knew, avoiding particularly closed ecosystems turned out to be a good idea all around in the long term.

I don't "speak ill of banking corporations" because I don't see, well, any that I can think of offhand in the US, being actively, aggressively evil. Stupid in many cases, for sure, but that's a different thing, and not axiomatically akin to Microsoft's crimes.

Ballmer had an attitude that Microsoft needed to dominate every industry they participated in or they would take their toys and go home. That mindset doesn't work in today's technology world, where markets overlap and shift rapidly.

Nadella can't change the culture of the company overnight, but he has pushed through a bunch of great changes to their product strategy -- especially in the consumer space. I mean, Office 2016 finally has a consistent interface on OS X, Windows and Android/iOS. And Microsoft has an enterprise sales partnership with Apple! That would never have happened under Ballmer -- Microsoft is essentially letting Apple use its greatest asset (its partner sales channels) to push iPads so that Microsoft can sell Office and Exchange licenses. Nevermind that its channel partners were already selling their clients iPads anyway; Ballmer would have crammed Surface down the pipeline and wondered why sales numbers were sluggish.

I think toward the end of his tenure, Ballmer started to see why the company was so dysfunctional: it was built for the cutthroat tech landscape of 1998, not the highly fractured-but-integrated market of 2015. His last major moves as CEO were to get rid of the most divisive senior executives to pave the way for a guy like Nadella who could be a peacemaker with the rest of the tech world. Ballmer tore down the silos about a year before putting Nadella in charge of rebuilding the company, which in hindsight was a great move.

All this said, you're absolutely right about keeping one eye open: Nadella is pushing change from the top, but there are a lot of middle managers and junior executives who still do things the old way and will probably never change. You can't change the culture of a company overnight, and they will still continue to be evil in lots of small, subversive ways. If the market lets them get away with being shitty to their customers, they will do it.

I have no hatred for anyone. Just you need to intimately know who you pays your bills at the end of the day.

I have several reasons but mostly subjective preferences. In my previous job I was a fulltime Linux developer, spending all day with an Ubuntu box. Linux is great until you have to patch it or fight with video drivers after an upgrade. I still develop components for Linux on the backend side but I am done with the desktop for a while.

Don't get me wrong that had happened to me in every platform I have worked with (yeah with MacOSX too). I guess my point is, after a while all platforms are more or less the same to me in the core (maybe Windows falls behinds on the console side but cmder is nice enough to make it up) and at the end is just the surface what would make a difference.

To me, Microsoft was the only one doing something different on the mobile side (not anymore though) so that was the candy that brought me to this side for now. I don't know if OC's reasons are more practical but for me are just subjective preference.

Thanks to them, I paid mortgage off in under a decade. No other reason.

The things that matter when you're starting to work independently (which I screwed up I will add) are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible. Also I'm a bad accountant but YMMV if that interests you. If you can, don't work on their site; remote work is far nicer.

> are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible.

I know, but how do you do that? Right now I am working for home and remotely collaborating with a friend in a product, but the VC path is also hard :(

I'm going to add this as well: never work hard. Work out how not to work hard. Life is about what you do when you're not working for me at least.