| 1. What negative impact? I assume you understand the purpose of patents. Also the patents licensed for the fee are not disclosed. I had a windows touch screen phone 5 years before the iPhone and way before Google even existed. Microsoft was first out of the door there so it's understandable they want patent revenue from prior inventions. I think that's perfectly fair. Just because it costs your favourite company some money doesn't mean it isn't right. 2. Still bollocks. Caldera/SCO owned patents. Microsoft had Xenix and SFU out in production and wanted to avoid litigation as well. This was a pay off. The whole capital arrangement was similar to how most corporations bet on capital funds for pay offs. Granted it looked bad on paper. I'd understand if you listed the "get the facts" campaign which was nasty. SCO and their litigators and the legal teams were the only bad actors here. 3. They can't pump out browsers as quick as the other vendors. They're the only browser vendor that can offer a support lifecycle and paid up support. Google don't give a shit about support. Mozilla close anything that isn't easy to fix. I can phone up MS and get a paid fix in under a week. Not only that, most of these browsers are pushing broken shit out half the time and trying to get one over on the competition. The whole browser market is a complete mess. 4. Typing this on a Nokia handset (Lumia 820). They have market differentiation with Windows Phone. They have a reliable stable platform, no fragmentation and a backer with more cash than you can imagine. Its sensible. Shareholders and staff for screwed yes, but what do you expect from a corporation. Just because they're a brand you trust, doesn't mean they aren't populated by money grabbing assholes. And Android is a royal mess. A fine example of fragmentation and a rave to the bottom. Google have really poorly managed the platform resulting in a rotting mess. We've shot 200 Android handsets from our company because they're constant trouble (various including Nexus, HTC, Samsung). Over to iPhones and WP8 devices. I know the prevailing opinion amongst the tech culture is that Microsoft are a bag of shite, but you need to look deeper. The whole industry is horrible. At the end of the day, all I get from people is childish tribalism rather than facts and a fair process. It's like Slashdot in 2001. I'm sitting here with a Windows phone, a MacBook Pro, ssh'ed into a FreeBSD machine with VS2013 running in parallels. Please everyone just grow the fuck up. |
2. WTF? Xenix and SFU were in no way central to Microsoft's business, and I don't see how Microsoft arranging other banks to invest in SCO's scam had anything to do with licensing. Besides, the SCO case was about copyright, not patent, and Microsoft funds other companies to attack open source.
3. Microsoft actually disbanded the IE team after IE 6. Nobody can develop more slowly than not at all. I'm still not comfortable with modern IE, because Microsoft is trying to standardize DRM.
4. Fragmentation was never a problem for Nokia before, and Microsoft is still on the hook for S40 dumbphones. It doesn't help to differentiate by standardizing on an OS that (almost) nobody wants, or else Think Penguin would have a huge market. Nokia was a horribly mismanaged company, but Microsoft was not without fault for its rapid collapse.
Microsoft was never fair to us. It's still not a fair company.
Society works well when we have diversity. Most people "grow up" and become jaded and don't change anything. But society depends on people keeping their ideals and trying to change things for the better. One way is by reminding people that what we have actually is pretty awful compared to what we could have. So, it's instructive to remind people that Microsoft is still evil.