Earlier quoted context omitted.
the standard litany of complaints That phrase is sufficient to earn an upmod all on its own. Reading your reply, I immediately thought of people huddled in a church listening to the Vicar preach against Microsoft's evil. But it isn't a passionate speech full of fire and brimstone, it's a standard reading that he has given so many times, his voice is now a monotone and the parishioners know every word by heart.
Ha, good visualization. I find much of what I read here to be like that. Especially when people or corporations (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook) are called evil. At that point it always feels like we've left the realm of enlightened conversation. There's never a recognized gray area. It saddens me and makes me giggle whenever I see the community patting itself on the back for the quality of its discussion.
My position is that Microsoft nudged the line of business practices and spent a lot of time in the gray area between generally acceptable and illegal. Most of it was a hard to judge because it involved holding MS to a different standard due to their size and weight. They got nudged back by the courts and the public.
In hindsight, I think they are almost certainly better off for having had them.
Bill may not have been an exemplary moral model in his practices at that time, but he wasn't an extreme example of immoral CEO either. It was a relatively short period in MS history that was like that. He is an extreme example of a moral billionaire now.
See? Sounds like a boring compromise.