Many people who hate Microsoft do it as a pavlonian response to years upon years of fighting against crappy Microsoft products. People who'd like to spend 90% of their time creating instead spend 25% creating, 30% watering it down enough to be easily "cross platform", and 45% of their time figuring out why-the-fuck-it-doesn't-work-in-Internet-Explorer. This is the same browser where merely calling console.log threw an error until surprisingly recently.

I met a bunch of the IE folks at CES 2012, and I honestly believe their trying to be better web citizens. They are still slower than I'd like, but IE isn't quite terrible anymore. I have friends who work at various browser vendors, and I don't sense any lingering ill-will towards IE.

That said, I certainly understand why some people are slow to get excited about Microsoft. You don't have to be middle-aged to have personally experienced the bad side of Microsoft.