Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

The reason I dislike Microsoft and actively avoid their platforms is largely because despite their vast resources and obvious talent, their management rarely compete head to head with technology and would rather resort to other practises that, as a tech person make me sad.

There are plenty of examples of this. See what they did to companies that wanted to ship dual-boot BeOS systems. See the approach they took to OOXML. See the approach they're currently taking to suing OEMs shipping Android handsets that refuse to pay their license fees. See the copius amounts of misinformation they put out about Linux.

A company with Microsoft's resources, I want to see competing for my business with the tech they're obviously capable of producing.

Linux comes with Apache, Python, C/C++, Perl, AWK, sed, vi, emacs, and more.

Windows comes with Minesweeper.

When I was starting out there was no Microsoft or Linux. I got a machine that had a programming lanuage built in to it, and I could write programs.

Pretty much the first large program I wrote was a compiler to convert a subset of BASIC into Z80. It was written in its own subset, and could compile itself. I hacked into the cassette save routines, smashed the stack, bootstrapped into a machine code monitor (not even assembler) that I wrote, and I was writing games for people to play.

It's always seemed to me that Microsoft almost actively prevented me from using my own machine. I couldn't get into it without buying more. And more. I wrote my own OS that sat on top of DOS, then write a compiler for that, and suddenly I could write games again. And finance applications. And mathematical explorations.

I found some of the first Perrin pseudo-primes that way, bypassing Microsoft's systems because they prevented me from doind what I wanted with the resources I had access to.

I don't hate Microsoft, but every time I use a Windows box it fails in interesting ways, costing me time, effort, patience and occasionally yet more money.

I'll use Linux.

ADDED IN EDIT AFTER RE-READING: And I'll continue to contribute to various open-source projects.

I'm a programmer. Going back a few years, I hate Microsoft because:

* 8.3

* 16-bit address space

* Insanely complicated and needlessly POSIX-incompatible access control lists

* Registry

* Path separator: \ vs /

* Very expensive dev tools

* MSC++ isn't C++

* Handling of Java

* Management via GUI instead of text files

* Absence of usable shell

Yes, this list is way out of date. But these are the issues chased me out of the Microsoft world into Unix, Linux and open source. The few times I've had to deal with Microsoft software more recently (e.g. ACLs), the experience has served only to renew my loathing.

You might wish to consider that during roughly the same period IE4 came along to destroy Netscape, it was Netscape that was busy inventing proprietary tags - , , and the like.

Years ago we were writing some code involving windows telephony api. There was something wrong with one of the calls, it was not applying one of the parameters as documented in the api. Because of that we ended up dissembling it and making a binary patch to change a constant in a dll. We lost several weeks in the process. How long does it take Microsoft to fix a problem in an obscure dll that you depend on? Who knows.. This event made me realize if you are binding yourself to an operating system or any application thats is closed source, has opaque processes and almost no competition to make them improve it fast, there is good chance that one day you will end paying very dearly. I have other reasons to dislike Microsoft's attitude and practices but I gave this example because I still vividly remember the suffering and helplessness we lived that time. As for the Visual Studio comment, I used it and don't see anything special about it, If you are a Microsoft shop maybe it is good for you, otherwise, there are comparable - better IDEs out there to do the job.