4.3 KiB
Whats so bad about microsoft?
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Microsoft collaborated with the NSA's prism program to:
- Read and store all outlook service emails.
- Read all your OneDrive files.
- NSA recorded all Skype calls.
- Windows 10 watches everything you type and sends it to Microsoft. Branded by microsoft as telemetry, its stated purpose is to provide you a personalized user dictionary, and provide you with text suggestions as you type. Even after turned off, it still collects data and sends to microsoft. Microsoft retroactively added Windows 10 spying to Windows 7 and 8.
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Microsoft has a long history of buying up and killing small companies to stifle competition and innovation. The US Department of Justice launched an anti-trust suit against Microsoft in 2001. Documents on microsoft found that they referred to a policy called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors. This policy was either attempted or successfully carried out via:
- After Microsoft crushed browser competition with its operating system monopoly, a web dark ages stalled browser development for 2 years.
- Browser incompatibilities: Killing Netscape via incompatible Java, CSS, and ActiveX incompatibilies.
- Office incompatibilities: Bill gates : "One thing we have got to change in our strategy—allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples [sic] browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company."
- Java incompatibilities: Tried to kill sun by introducing Java incompatibilities. Lost two lawsuits to Sun.
- Messaging: Killed AOL's instant messenger via embracing then introducing incompatibilities in AIM messenger.
- Microsoft acquired Nokia, and mandated that Windows Phone 7 be put on all new phones. 9000 workers quit the company in protest, and Nokia's brand value fell from 5th to 98th place in 2014.
- Microsoft acquires Skype, it becomes bloated and users flee to other platforms.
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Its workers often suffer burnout, and has been called a velvet sweatshop. Microsoft lost a lawsuit for $93 million for using "permatemp" employees, which were worked as hard as ordinary employees, yet received none of the benefits. Microsoft is the largest American corporate user of H-1B guest worker visas in order to pay them less. Microsoft has also come under criticism for developing software capable of analyzing the output of remote sensors in order to measure the competence and productivity of workers based on their physical responses.
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Github, now owned by microsoft, begins blocking developers from countries antagonistic to the US such as Iran, Russia.