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.