Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

I think that maintaining a community like this is really a dynamic process, so while it's important to make note of bad incentive situations for the future, it's not necessarily the best choice to correct them prematurely. In theory, your reasoning sounds right. In practice, that's probably not happening right now, so the mechanism still serves its purpose with only the (presumably considered acceptable) expected collateral damage.

The important thing with a situation like that is to be ready to kill the feature as soon as people learn how to exploit it. It's one thing to see that it's theoretically exploitable. It's another to actually figure out how to selectively engineer flame wars to make a significant dent in the front page.

I always find it really hard to understand this behavior as well, as a self confessed geek I really enjoy using all technology Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. I really dont understand how people can be the cheer squad for a corporate company, because they are all profit driven every single one of them is inherently evil. So we should look at what they all do an have discourse on the actions. To me HN is becoming like the console condition PS4 vs XBOXONE, the companies want you to be like this, any sensible person with critical thinking can see that everything is flawed and innovation is everywhere.

Being a fan or enemy of a company is stupid, you are just playing into consumerism. I hope every tablet company has success because competition is good for me.

Well, I run Elementary on my laptop, OS X on my iMac, have an iPhone, a Nexus 7, and a BlackBerry Playbook (quite an underrated tablet for it's time). I'm a developer, and build apps for all of those devices.

And you know what? WPF _is_ nice. I _liked_ Silverlight (but am frustrated that it doesn't work under Linux, though not surprised). Microsoft make _good_ developer tools, in my personal humble opinion.

The problem I see are they still make a large amount of missteps, and don't engage the "tastemakers" of tech anymore. Any goodwill they once had has been squandered, and if you look at Yahoo! you can see that it's super difficult to get it back.

Now that Ballmer is leaving, it will be interesting to see what happens in the future -- will they get a CEO that isn't afraid to take big, bold risks? To cook the golden goose in the short-term, perhaps, to allow for growth into new markets?

Somehow I doubt it, but I wish they would.

Windows 8 has been really good to me; I've installed it (and Office 2013) on all the devices of my family and (ex)girlfriends, my ex has a Windows Phone on my recommendation. They all love it, and find it easier to use than anything in the past. Just today, I purchased a touch-screen HP All-In-One for my Grandfather, and he loves it (and is super excited about using the Kindle app while in his lean-back chair on the 22" screen, synced with his Kindle itself).

When I was working at Harvey Norman, I sold $15 000 worth of Surface and Surface Pros to customers in one month; They were easy to sell as long as you knew how to appeal to the consumers _actual_ needs. They didn't suit everyone, but for those that did no other Tablet came close.

Basically, they have more potential than nearly any other tech company out there. Something has been holding them back, and they've succeeded in spite of themselves. I hope that they can turn it around moving forward.

OK, I didn't accuse you but I did accuse another poster of being an MS shill. I'll admit I could have been more diplomatic. Still, as I recall, the person I accused was a professional "evangelist" (or something similar) for MS by their own admission writing an article about, what do you know, hatred of MS.

And that's the thing. By the evangelist's own admission, MS is deeply hated in society at large. It's understandable but unlike a lowly MS engineer (who I do pity), a professional corporate "face" can't play the innocent victim.

Just consider. The very recent imposition of the Metro/Windows 8 interface on a widely unwilling public is prima facie evidence of MS' continuing abuse of it's particular monopoly.

The point isn't that MS has more of a monopoly than other corporations. It is that MS has a long, long history of wielding the big stick of their monopoly openly and brutally against enemies and "non-combatants" alike. A huge number of Windows users woke up without a Start Button because Balmer was gunning for a new market. Lie all you want about this being for the average person's benefit, you only prove my point. Yeah, I just don't think you can spin maneuvers like that into "we just build the future".

Edit: Just to note, I don't do editorial flagging. I'm not out to "get" MS but, well, they bring up feelings.

Embrace, extend, extinguish is a tactic more aggressive than using open source but not contributing much back. Maybe you've forgotten how strong the MS dominance became in the late 1990s. Governments (US and EU) were going after MS -- not just aspects of their privacy agreements (as with Google today), but threatening to divide MS into separate corporations. Friendships were broken when people changed sides.

This was before the current tumult caused by the internet and mobile computing. It kind of seemed, back then, that things were going to just continue as they had been, only more so, and everything would be built on top of Windows.

This reaction (over-reaction?) to MS, then, comes from historically-rooted fear. It's a powerful emotion, and sometimes it can be correct.

You know, maybe there's an argument that the Unix world has a persecution complex, because there have been license and freedom debates since the very beginning. Here's an illustrative fragment: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/origins-of-geek...