Dana Blankenhorn asks What Would Make You Trust Microsoft? Good question. I’ll apply the same standard here as I do to everything else — God’s sense of justice.
First, I suppose we should note, as one poster did, there are several different major parts to the Evil Empire, and they aren’t all evil. I agree the computer accessories are some of the best. Upon pulling my Dell Inspiron 545 MT out of the box, I immediately replaced the mouse with a Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse 2.0. I absolutely hated the Dell keyboard, because they have done insidious things like moving the 6-pack around to vertical, and I can’t touch-type any more, so as soon as I could afford it, I got a Microsoft ComfortCurve 2000 keyboard (I hate wireless). Good hardware. The rest of the company I don’t trust.
What would change that?
1. Fess up — It would take a huge fat book, but all those times they bought, stole or simply squashed a better product by someone else. It’s okay to buy a competitor out if you don’t orphan the loyal users. To this day I hold a measure of genuine hatred over the loss of certain favorite products, vastly superior to anything MS has ever had or ever will produce. They are gone forever because MS broke the law, and God’s Laws, in destroying the company that made them. Don’t tell me this is “just business” — humans are not machines, and God requires everyone to respect their needs.
2. Drop the Arrogance — This is actually the most hateful thing of all: The company takes itself too seriously. The moral high ground is to admit mistakes with good humor, and openly confess when someone else has a better idea, and then promise to compete honestly. “We honestly believe we can come up with something you’ll love, so give us a chance.” Think what that says to people about the personality of the company. Instead, MS spokesmen try to deny reality itself, working to construct a false propaganda world-according-to-MS. “We will tell you when to think and what to think.” This is the underlying evil which foments such things as the arm-twisting of hardware makers about monopoly installation of Windows, etc. If you never experience anything else, how can you know if Windows is really the best?
3. Culture war — To a large degree, what makes major corporations a very serious threat to humanity is embodied in, and derived from, the actions of MS. That is, what makes it all so ugly can be blamed partially on MS. The unconscionable denial of accountability has made MS tactics a household word — “clickwrap.” Greed and unreasonable profits are a sin, for all you capitalists out there. God is not a capitalist, nor a communist. He’s a family God, and both of those -isms are a sin against God’s intent. So we have a huge body of civil legal expectations shaped by MS, and it is distinctly a turn for the worse.
I have no bone to pick with the big push against piracy. While I do find it an utterly foolish, dead end business policy, it’s legitimate. So, to some degree, I see this as the seed of their own destruction. The future for software viability as a market is recognizing you cannot possibly control the bits and bytes, but you can control the support system which keeps them useful. RedHat is the future of corporate computing, and Canonical does best at reaching the common user. What the latter now needs is to slow down and stop catering so much to the hobby users, and focus on the needs of the much larger market of ordinary home users. Their LTS releases are almost there, so they only need a stronger emphasis and a fair market entryway.
Mac can never displace the Linux market, because Apple holds little appeal for the more staid average consumer. Besides, they are hardly more honest than MS in how they handle consumers. Both MS and Apple are guilty of cynical abuse on a massive scale, so I don’t trust them, either. To the degree any entity adheres to the hobbyist, rolling-release, never fix anything or produce a stable product, I don’t really trust too many Linux operations, either. So I don’t trust the GNOME or KDE projects, for example. They might be open, but they are utterly heartless. What makes them usable at all is that you can fix their stuff if you have the resources, so it justifies RedHat’s default choice for GNOME.
