[mattmaroon]

Ha, good visualization. I find much of what I read here to be like that. Especially when people or corporations (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook) are called evil. At that point it always feels like we've left the realm of enlightened conversation. There's never a recognized gray area. It saddens me and makes me giggle whenever I see the community patting itself on the back for the quality of its discussion.

[netcan]

Well.. when discussions get preachy like this it's hard to come in and make any impact with a gray area opinion.

My position is that Microsoft nudged the line of business practices and spent a lot of time in the gray area between generally acceptable and illegal. Most of it was a hard to judge because it involved holding MS to a different standard due to their size and weight. They got nudged back by the courts and the public.

In hindsight, I think they are almost certainly better off for having had them.

Bill may not have been an exemplary moral model in his practices at that time, but he wasn't an extreme example of immoral CEO either. It was a relatively short period in MS history that was like that. He is an extreme example of a moral billionaire now.

See? Sounds like a boring compromise.

[donaq]

It saddens me and makes me giggle whenever I see the community patting itself on the back for the quality of its discussion.

Amen. I have several times tried to comment to that effect, but couldn't come up with the words. Thanks for saying it. Especially irksome to me are comments that go something like "You're on HN, you're better than that." in response to a comment on which the poster disapproves. Let's skip the childish reverse psychology attempts, shall we?