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Some critial articles about MicroSoft

Disclaimer

These pages here are supposed to be critical about the business practices of MS. While I can understand that it might be in their best interest and I think Bill Gates is brilliant for sure, I think that their interests don't serve the general interest of the gross public.

They are competing, but they are using unfair methods and it's up to legislation (that is in my case the European Union) to take measures to ensure that they are heading back to accepted ways of competition. They are not just a Software company as it seems, they want to get the Information Monopoly and if they get it, the robber barons of the Mid Ages were nice guys compared to them. Again, if you're the robber baron it make sense for you to behave that way, but such behaviour destroys the personal freedom and the economy!

The articles presented here are of course selected and may give one the extreme view, but on the other hand magazines usually publish extremely positive views.

If I'm violating the copyright I'm terribly sorry, but sometimes copying is the only way to prevent such things from disappearing.

Some articles to think about

To prevent critical articles from disappering (even if the URLs just break by a server reorganisation) I have made excerpts (doing a little changes as possible, just removing banners,... pointers into the woods) available here:

For the demise of OS/2, not only IBM is guilty being too silly to continue to push OS/2 as an alternative to MS products, but MS fighted an undeclared war against OS/2 and IBM as the current trial shows. It has become much clearer that in 1995 when IBM was still marketing (or at least they tried to) e.g. in TV-spots (remember the nuns?) that the decision to kill OS/2 was already made at the top level of the company (the remaining question is, will you ever more trust what IBM says is strategic but just drops it the next day? For me the decision is clearly no, I'm not gonna ride the Windows wave but starting to learn Linux):

I decided to skip details about practices from the current trial of the US department of Justice against MS until a result is available. But if you follow this trial you likely have seen that even the judge thinks that the memories of Bill Gates are leaking at least...

A more important point about how MS thinks and acts are the famous Halloween documents. They can be found at Open Source, for your conveniance they are available here too (though written against LINUX really worth reading):

What can you do

Yes you can help to spread the word about MS's real tactics too (some thoughts to follow soon)! I haven't still had time to add my comments here yet, sorry!

As a starting point, you may taka a look at my SoothSayer's column.


(C) Roman Stangl (Roman_Stangl@at.ibm.com), 06.08.1998
Last update: 01.12.2000
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