What is so bad about Apple, Microsoft and their policies?

[billdotson]

I hear people talking about how bad Microsoft is and how their policies are evil and such and I have also heard the same things about Apple.

Could someone please give me some insight as to why these companies are "evil"?

Also I hear many people who complain about how the patent/copyright/intellectual property system in the US is ridiculous and needs to be re-thought. Could I also have some insight into that issue as well?

[duff]

Also I hear many people who complain about how the patent/copyright/intellectual property system in the US is ridiculous and needs to be re-thought. Could I also have some insight into that issue as well?
good start -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents

[beniwtv]

I hear people talking about how bad Microsoft is and how their policies are evil and such and I have also heard the same things about Apple.

In case of Microsoft, first there is:

DRM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management

Wrong in my opinion on this is they have TOTAL control of your legally purchased content, even they can decide it on which media players you can play it. Content protection can be done in a better way.

WGA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Genuine_Advantage and http://forums.microsoft.com/Genuine/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=125&SiteID=25

See for yourself what's wrong with this.

Trusted computing: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html

...



Could someone please give me some insight as to why these companies are "evil"?

These methods are just from an evil company that just can't produce good software. Anyway, I own a 5 year old machine, which I can use to play doom 3 or half life 2 perfectly well, but windows vista tells me I don't have even enough graphic card to run Windows Movie Maker.

I feel like Microsoft slapped me in the face and laughing at me. THAT are the type of things that make them evil. You just aren't able to get all the technology which you get in Linux today.

Examples (all are there in Ubuntu OOTB): a decent telnet that works, a decent ssh client, open office, evolution, etc.. I think you get the point.

I for all, have decided to not play the victim for Microsoft anymore, and replaced it with Ubuntu.

[chewearn]

Let me proposed a recent example on Apple.

After making tons of money on iTunes, and becoming effectively a monopoly in the online music business, Apple started to get pressured from some European countries to open up their Fairplay technology. But, instead of playing fair, and licensing Fairplay, Steve Jobs recently came out against DRM, saying its the RIAA fault.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

Now, I'm not supporting RIAA and DRM, but if you read between the lines, Jobs respond was clearly not motivated to benefit their customers.

Here is a response from Michael Robertson founder of Linspire:
http://www.michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=231

[The Grum]

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

Another good place to start.

[7h35ur930n]

I have just looked at your post while here at Apple on my lunch brake, would it be possible for you to give a more in depth explanation of what policies and why you hate them so much. Generally the phone agents have degrees or other technical quaifications therefore there knowledge should be chargable, the companies have often invested alot of time and money into there agents, why should they pass this technical knowledge to there customers for free. University isn't cheap.

[jrusso2]

http://www.ihatemicrosoft.com/mainbox.php4

[tigerpants]

I hear people talking about how bad Microsoft is and how their policies are evil and such and I have also heard the same things about Apple.

Could someone please give me some insight as to why these companies are "evil"?

Also I hear many people who complain about how the patent/copyright/intellectual property system in the US is ridiculous and needs to be re-thought. Could I also have some insight into that issue as well?

The problem for me with these companies is this:

With Microsoft, it is the size of the company and the amount of power it weilds in the PC market. Its a virtual monopoly, and that is not good for several reasons, principally, innovation, open development and competition. Basically, it has too much power. No one company should dominate any market, fullstop.

With Apple, its the sanctimonious hypocrasy of the company. Steve Jobbs is nothing more than a Bill Gates wannabe, trying hard to be an everyman. He regularly contradicts himself and generally talks out of his backside. His business model is to make a computer as shiny as possible and sell it as a trinket. People bark on about how great OSX is, but hey, this is a company that, lets not forget, has not only replaced its hardware architecture cos it was crap but also the foundation of its OS. Jobbs also talked recently about getting rid of DRM in music - this is from a man that was at the forefront of instigating it - iTunes is the most appalling distribution framework in the world. Wanna play your itune download on a Creative? Tough you can't.

Both companies do nothing for their customers but **** them off and try and lock them into their business models. They both treat their customers like the enemy and kow-tow immediately to any idiotic suggestion the movie industry or music industry suggest, instead of saying "hang on, that sucks, that doesn't help our customers." They both, MS especially, hold significant power with these people and could do alot more to protect the interests of their customers.

Instead, they just crap all over them. With Apple, you pay twice the amount to be crapped over.

They aren't evil per se, they are just stupid and greedy.

[prizrak]

I have just looked at your post while here at Apple on my lunch brake, would it be possible for you to give a more in depth explanation of what policies and why you hate them so much. Generally the phone agents have degrees or other technical quaifications therefore there knowledge should be chargable, the companies have often invested alot of time and money into there agents, why should they pass this technical knowledge to there customers for free. University isn't cheap.

What I think is wrong with Apple:
1) They are a huge black box - Apple keeps all of their developments secret, they want 100% control of any device they sell to the consumer.

2) They are idiots - If OS X would be runnable on any computer as Linux is, Apple would most likely be 20-25% of the OS market. I know quite a few people who would like to switch from Windows but are not techie enough to install Linux (and I can't do it for certain reasons) and couldn't afford to get a Mac. These are people who would like to use OS X and if Apple sold it for like $200/copy they would be able to pick one up.

3) Their products are inferior - look around the forum for MP3 player threads and notice something. Just about every DMP (digital media player) is cheaper than the iPod (or is the same price) and comes with things like radio, voice recorder, video playback (Nano vs Sansa E2xx) and an ability to add songs via UMS (USB Mass Storage) interface. iPod's require a special protocol for communication and it's a closed one. See how many people have issues with gtk-pod, amarok, listen, songbird and so on.

4) Hugely overpriced (kinda ties into the above IMO) - I have priced out the MacBook Pro vs a Lenovo 3000 series my friend has. WIth the same exact specs (and we are talking Intel Macs) the MacBook was something like $500 more than the Lenovo. Where does the $500 go? Don't tell me that's the price of the OS cuz even Vista isn't that expensive unless you go for the Ultimate (Business?) and most home users (Apple's target audience) wouldn't anyway.

5) They sell a lifestyle not a product - That's something I hate about any company that tries to do that. The recent Apple commercials show Windows PC as a boring all work and no play system and the Mac is the exciting "different" young dude. Instead of trying to compete on product strength (since there really is none) they try to convince the consumer that getting a Mac is a lifestyle choice.

[Adamant1988]

I hear people talking about how bad Microsoft is and how their policies are evil and such and I have also heard the same things about Apple.

Could someone please give me some insight as to why these companies are "evil"?

Also I hear many people who complain about how the patent/copyright/intellectual property system in the US is ridiculous and needs to be re-thought. Could I also have some insight into that issue as well?

Both Microsoft and Apple have "Closed" and proprietary designs. They are "evil companies" that are merely out to get our money. Or so it's been said. I don't think a lot of the more gung-ho amongst Linux users understand that in order to get our money those companies need to keep us happy.

As for the patenting system in the nation, I think that the whole idea was "If we protect the creators of these ideas they will produce more ideas".

Ex: Jack has just patented his design for a wonderful improvement on the lightbulb. Because Jack owns the rights to this patent he is in a position to make milllions of dollars from his idea. Jack never has to work again for a day in his life and spends his time coming up with more great ideas that he can use to increase his fortune.

If we lived in a more "free" society, Jack at the very most might get an honorable mention for his wonderful design. It's worth noting though that since any company could legally use his improvements without his permission the price-tag on the new and improved lightbulbs would be considerably lower and everyone would benefit from it. The only actual benefit that Jack would see from this would be saving a couple of bucks per lightbulb.

A lot of people are encouraged to create great ideas because they want to get rich. A lot of people just want to help other people and seek no real benefit from it. The former of those groups think the latter is stupid for not taking advantage of their opportunities, and the latter thinks the former is evil for being greedy.

Each system has it's advantages and it's disadvantages, and parties on both camps are very opinionated about it.

[prizrak]

Both Microsoft and Apple have "Closed" and proprietary designs. They are "evil companies" that are merely out to get our money. Or so it's been said. I don't think a lot of the more gung-ho amongst Linux users understand that in order to get our money those companies need to keep us happy.

The issue is that neither of them do. MS has absolute dominance to the point where the cost of switching is prohibitive. Real money and power is always with organizations so I will use them as example.

Take any large company that has servers in the hundreds. Now just take even the database part of IT (a very large part of IT infrastructure btw). MS SQL is either #1 or #2 product by market share. So for any company to get rid of WIndows they would have to lay off pretty much the entire DBA force and hire new people. They would also have to migrate Terabytes of data from one db format to another. All of the software that uses MS SQL as the back end will need to be rewritten (in many cases in a different language). There would be a need for new monitoring/administration tools (what worked with MS SQL won't work with Postgrese or MySQL). In any organization there is also usually quite a bit of special software (whether internally developed or bought) that runs on Windows so that needs to run somehow. Yes WIndows can be run in VM's but that still requires license for VM software and Windows itself.

Same exact thing with Apple, there is alot of specialized stuff for Mac (professional music is pretty much 100% Mac based) plus proprietary formats that keep you chained to one platform (if your iPod is 90% iTunes bought music good luck switching to Sansa).

Basically the point is that there really is no need for either of those companies to make it's consumers happy. They are locked in and only some huge problem of galactic proportions or usage of 100% platform agnostic stuff allows for movement.


Jack has just patented his design for a wonderful improvement on the lightbulb. Because Jack owns the rights to this patent he is in a position to make milllions of dollars from his idea. Jack never has to work again for a day in his life and spends his time coming up with more great ideas that he can use to increase his fortune.
Problem here is threefold:
1) Private citizens rarely if ever get patents/copyrights anymore, just about every company has a clause in the employment agreement naming them as having dibs on anything you come up with. (Even my internship agreement contained that). There is also an issue of R&D where the issue, other than cost of it, is that it's a team of people and no single individual can claim the patent.

2) The technology involved in most of the patents is usually over the head of the patent office and results in many frivolous patents that are granted for nothing. MS actually holds a patent for double clicking and power and information transfer over living tissue (just had a thought? pay MS).

3) Software patents are completely idiotic because they for one try to patent ideas, which are legally non-patantable. When it comes to code there are only so many ways of writing an if-then statement. Two people implementing the same idea will end up with similar code/interface. For two the idea of patents was that you tell us how it's done and you can have exclusive rights to it for a number of years (7 in the US I believe) and then we will release your knowledge to the world. Well the issue with software is that once you see it you can clone it without needing the source code so there really is no point in patenting it. Another problem is the fact that the patent is granted for an enormous amount of time. 7 years in the software world is eternity. Even XP (the longest run version of software I know of) was replaced after 6 years.

The system was good in the older days but it hasn't been able to keep up with current times and this is why it's broken.

[TheWizzard]

I have just looked at your post while here at Apple on my lunch brake, would it be possible for you to give a more in depth explanation of what policies and why you hate them so much. Generally the phone agents have degrees or other technical quaifications therefore there knowledge should be chargable, the companies have often invested alot of time and money into there agents, why should they pass this technical knowledge to there customers for free. University isn't cheap.

just a few things about apple:

1) apple is harming the environment more than any other electronics producer

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/assets/graphics/ranking-guide-dec
http://www.greenpeace.org/internatio...es-race-061206

2) i cannot use the music format i want (ogg) on my ipod

3) a powerbook costs 2.5 times as much as a blank non-apple laptop with the same specifications

4) apple fanboys annoy me.

[billdotson]

I pretty much do not agree with the following:

DRM on music. I don't buy tons and tons of music so this isn't a huge issue for me but still half of my music was bought from walmart.com and a couple songs from urge. Guess what.. I didn't know so now I have all those songs in .wma and have DRM restrictions on them. But I can't convert them because getting past the DRM is illegal.

The way Microsoft and Apple are so rich yet they they just keep trying to get even more money. "Hey giant corportations! Did you know that half of the people in this planet live on about $2 a day?
Did you know that approximately 37 MILLION people live at poverty level in the United States alone." The idea of lets make as much money as we can and give some of it away just to please some people. It is not only this way with Microsoft or Apple, but the music industry, the oil industry, etc. It really ticks me off when I hear of CEOs at corporations getting paid 100 million a year.

The way they are entrenched in the market. Microsoft has so much money so they could probably sue anyone over anything and with their endless line of lawyers they could succeed. The US economy is not really a free market with these big companies. While people do have the choice to buy whatever they want these big companies have found loopholes and/or just outright exploited the copyright and patent laws and made big money deals with other corporations/industries so that it would be incredibly disadvantageous to buy anything other than their product.

Say you are an IT guy at a business. You want to switch to a Linux-based OS to save money. But guess what.. it will cost you a ridiculous amount of money to switch.

I am an American and capitalism and freedom of speech and all that stuff is great, but why does the gov't allow corporations to just hoard so much money, and entrench themselves into the market so much that you really don't have a choice to buy what you want. All this ridiculous patents on software and even ideas restrict the advancement of technology. Technology could advance so much more if companies didn't spend half their time suing each other over ideas.

For instance, Cisco and Apple are battling over the name of the iPhone or something of that nature right now.

I know that people's intellectual property shouldn't just be outright stolen but there has to be a better way.

and wow.. I have read about Sony's rootkit CDs and Microsofts WGA "spyware" I also had to download and install something to play Walmart media files.