On: Microsoft to do away with "Nokia" and "Lumia" branding

[scholia]

The sort of booby who thinks Microsoft is evil has obviously never heard of Enron, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, BP etc etc.

It's perfectly fine to use children as slave labor, destroy the environment or actually kill people (eg Dow in Bhopal).

None of these is anything like as bad as paying American workers to write useful software and sell it.

[Peaker → scholia]

Your point would come across better if you had mentioned monopolizing markets illegally and other MS actions rather than the silly straw man there.

[scholia → Peaker]

Straw man? You think these examples are not literally true?

Not sure if you have a clue what Microsoft actually did more than 15 years ago, but if you think it was worse than using children as slave labor, destroying swathes of the environment or killing people then I have pity on your soul....

[Peaker → scholia]

No, I don't think what MS did is worse. But "writing useful software" was not the reason they were hated. That's the strawman, and it detracts from your argument.

[scholia → Peaker]

Point taken, but it seems to me the thing that open source fanboys are actually complaining about. Almost none of them knows what Microsoft is supposed to have done.

[Peaker → scholia]

Some worse things:

Microsoft's OEM deals to throw out Netscape.

Bundling IE with their monopolistic OS to kill Netscape

Disallowing OEMs to sell computers with any OS but Windows (or demanding 3x the price for Windows licenses).

Killing DR-DOS by having Windows refuse to start if it detects DR-DOS.

Funding and encouraging SCO's baseless lawsuit to create FUD around Linux.

And various other scandals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

[scholia → Peaker]

None of which ranks up there with killing people, or mass financial fraud, even if they were true. Which several of them are not.

[Peaker → scholia]

I agree, but they are pretty bad. My point was specifically about underplaying their illegal and immoral practices as "building useful software" which is not conductive to useful discussion.

Which ones do you believe aren't true?

[outside1234 → Peaker]

You mean like Google is now with search (let's be real) and how they are tying their products into search (which they are).