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Originally Posted by Tristan Lall
Propaganda? Maybe--but heavily biased, certainly. What are we supposed to do with this site? Laugh? Cry? Use it to topple Microsoft's evil domination of the proletariat?
That site, while offering some legitmate commentary on Microsoft's practices, completely fails to account for the fact that most of these practices are fairly normal, and accepted in most other sectors of the marketplace. If the quarrel is with large corporations in general, then several of their arguments are wholly legitimate ("predatory practices", for instance). If, as it seems, the quarrel is entirely with Microsoft, claims of "closed standards" and "backward incompatibility" and the like could be equally applied to numerous other computer-technology firms. Apple, for instance.
Also the frequent claims of buggy software are foolish--look at Mac OS 10, and describe how the bugs in it's original release were fundamentally different from the bugs in XP. And many of them were fixed in 10.1 and 10.2 and XP SP1! As it happens, programmers can frequently be lazy, and quality assurance departments lax. It just isn't feasible for most software to be scrutinized to the level that we would wish. With up to 50 million lines of code in a fully-featured operating system, and the need to bring it to market in a reasonable time, it is positively inevitable that bugs will exist--and when you do have the most popular products on the market, it is very likely that those same bugs will impact a greater number of people.
Microsoft considers Linux to be a competing platform. It's not unreasonable to favour your own platform over that of a competitor. So what's the problem?
The other accusation is laughable. I hope that was an attempt at humour, like the solutions you propose.
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While true that OSX has had some bugs, the fixes were released fast and included other improvements, compared to just ONE service pack for XP so far. Also, it's the fact that the world is changing when it comes to computers is the problem. People now have power, and when that power is taken away by Microsoft and other corporations, then they angary. There's a difference between Jiffy Lube using those tactics since not many of us can go diagnose and fix a car, but many here can do that to a computer. Power for people is the change here.