Seriously. Microsoft has an unmatched record of screwing pretty much everyone who did business with them, and otherwise abusing their position in the market. Worse than IBM when IBM was in their position.
Are you sure you didn't mean "Oracle"? As far as I know, Microsoft deals with their business partners fairly. They don't try to negotiate a deal directly with a big customer and bypass their partners, for instance.
I'm talking more about "peers" than what I think you're referring to as "partners". E.g. 3Com as I cite elsewhere, Verizon WRT to the Kin, the company they licensed the start of Internet Explorer from (expected royalty payments never materialized when the gave it away for free), the examples go on and on and on.
But I suppose with Balmer the salesman in charge in between Gates and Nadella they'd avoid sales channel betrayals like that.
With regards to the Kin, I think Verizon shafted MS on that one. The device was good for it's time (something with photos and music targeted at teens that didn't have a full web connection), but Verizon forced you to buy a full $30/mo web plan to use those features (this was back when the web options were $30/mo unlimited plans or no web connection at all).
If there was a cheaper connection just for the Kin, it would've done reasonably well as a replacement for the Sidekick.
The lateness of the Kin is supposed to be one of the reasons Verizon did that, the market window had passed. It was also only a fraction of what was promised, heck, what Danger and T-Mobile delivered years earlier (as far as I know you're wrong about what it actually delivered at launch vs. what was promised).
Microsoft's database blunder with the Sidekick less than a year before the Kin's release (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sidekick_data_loss) also contributed, I'm sure, at that time few were willing to trust them with their data. It's a testament to how far Microsoft has come that that's apparently changed with Azure.
In this case, I view Verizon as replying in kind. Which is part of my point, when you treat your peers like s*, there are consequences.
> Microsoft has an unmatched record of screwing pretty much everyone who did business with them
Could you list instances of this? Don't get me wrong, they have been absolute bastards in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i is my go-to example). But keep in mind it is a huge company that has done business with thousands of firms over the past few decades, so to substantiate your point, you would have to produce a pretty big list.
While your request is not in principle unreasonable, it's way too much work for me to prove it to your satisfaction, or my satisfaction in a formal, balanced, I'd be willing to publish it way. E.g. I'd forgotten about I4i, despite the prominence of the case.
I'm basically asking you, absent either of us going beyond searches like https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+microsoft+crimes ^_^, to trust my observations of these businesses since the fall of 1977 when I started in the field. Heck, I was a great fan of Microsoft until NT 3.51 SP2 (and for a while beyond, it was Vista that completed the job). It was a pattern of behavior that became more and more obvious sometime in the late '90s that changed my opinion of the company, capped with their all out illegitimate assault on Linux and FOSS starting in the early '00s. And I of course don't expect you to take my word for it.
I just don't see it in their peers, not even Oracle.
Ah, here's a different angle: name the healthy peers that are willing to work with Microsoft today, beyond what's absolutely required. Yahoo! fails hard on healthy, Mozilla potentially as hard. I don't understand why/how Yahoo! is still in business, but Mozilla sure seems to be in their endgame (one reason I'm avoiding Rust for the time being).
You're acting like you hate the company just because they screwed their competitors. Do you hate other non-tech companies who screwed their competitors or is your hatred in this category especially reserved for Microsoft?
Do you speak ill of banking corporations as often as you do of Microsoft?
Also, if you run Apple hardware at all do yourself a favor and take a look at all the screwed up shit that Apple has done because that company has always been an asshole to just about every entity that they come into contact with.
I don't hate Microsoft today, and only did during the period they posed an existential threat to Linux/FOSS (and it was a relatively gentle sort of hate, made particularly easy by Vista).
I don't run Apple hardware, never have in my life. In part because I count them as worse to users (well, prior to own goals like Vista and Windows 8), but also because as of late they've been behaving particularly bad. Made that decision in 1987, who knew, avoiding particularly closed ecosystems turned out to be a good idea all around in the long term.
I don't "speak ill of banking corporations" because I don't see, well, any that I can think of offhand in the US, being actively, aggressively evil. Stupid in many cases, for sure, but that's a different thing, and not axiomatically akin to Microsoft's crimes.