> Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control?

Sometime in the last couple years Microsoft has realized how important online discussion is to a company's reputation and has begun an aggressive campaign of let's call it "community outreach".

Unfortunately though it appears to me to be astro turfing, the admins here and elsewhere seem to believe it to be legitimate, so whatever techniques they're using are sophisticated.