Anti-Microsoft Post to Tech Republic

There was a thread on TR lionizing Bill Gates. As usual, a lot of incorrect information was being spread about the Richest Man On Earth. I had to post this corrective:

Gates and Microsoft have had some legal problems.

In the late 90s, there was the "permanent independent contractor" problem, when ICs and temps were working at MS for years, inside their offices, during regular business hours. This was against the law. (If you're in this situation, your "client" aka "boss" is breaking the law.)

See Vizcaino v. Microsoft.

MS has been busted for anti-trust, particularly regarding the bundling of Internet Explorer. The bundling/integration was a problem, but maybe more important than the ability to uninstall IE has been the fact that MS hasn't been able to really preclude another browser from being installed. I believe that if the courts weren't watching, MS would probably have done something to make Firefox run worse inside Windows.

See United States v. Microsoft.

MS also has a history of pressuring hardware vendors from offering alternative OSs on their computers (often successfully). They did this when companies considered selling DR-DOS as an alternative to MS-DOS. They did it when vendors were offering Linux as an alternative to Windows. These vendors need the MS software, so they go along with MS.

MS has also tried to use its market dominance to both embrace-and-extend and copy-and-screw-up Java. They made their own JVM that, on the one hand, allowed programmers to call Windows code (a nice feature), but also contained numerous bugs that would cause java code to fail. I think this is a legal gray area, but, ethically, it's not playing very fair.

It's like, if beef sellers got together to open vegetarian restaurants that would deliberately sell bad food, with the intent of convincing the public that vegetarian food was poisonous and beef was safer.

Well, it's not quite like that. It's illegal to sell tainted food, but I'm not sure if it's illegal to sell tainted software, which is what Microsoft was doing.