Why I hate Microsoft

"A personal, lengthy, but highly articulate outburst"

5. Bad practice, foul play

Doing business with Microsoft has never been without risk. They have earned a reputation for dirty deals and backstabbing their business partners whenever that happened to suit them. Time and again small but innovative and high-tech developers entered into partnerships with Microsoft, only to find that Micosoft broke agreements, stole their technoloy, did not deliver, then dumped them on the edge of bankruptcy. Of course there are plenty of other companies who play dirty tricks in order to get ahead in the market. Microsoft is merely one of the biggest companies who have routinely used foul tactics. But then that's one of the risks of doing business that should be accepted: if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Still the risks of a partnership with Microsoft must be considered.
The customer on the other hand has not chosen to be part of this particular fight for commercial domination. Microsofts clients, and the clients of their business partners, are being promised, and are thus entitled to expect, good products. Instead they get bad products, or none at all, and they end up as pawns in Microsoft's foul play to establish a complete monopoly. Often they start out with buying bad products, and eventually they find themselves dealing with a supplier with a reputation for illegal practices.

As I have already mentioned, there are many things wrong with Microsoft products. Bugs and design flaws are common. Of course, all 'issues' with MS software will be dealt with in the next release... But not right now. That's the whole point: instead of fixing bugs, Microsoft actually uses these flaws as an excuse for an aggressive update policy. Microsoft doesn't fix bugs, but continuously releases new versions. They call this "innovation", but in truth the only purpose of this strategy is to inflate Microsoft's already obscene profits even further.

Picture this:
You buy a newly-built house from a real estate company. As soon as it starts to rain, you discover that the roof leaks. When you complain about it, the real estate company either ignores you or they tell you that this kind of roof is a brand-new innovation; the sort of house they used to sell never had such a beautiful roof. Instead of fixing your roof they promise that the next house they'll build won't leak. Eventually they complete their next house, three years or so behind schedule, and you have to pay a hefty price for it... only to find that it comes with a patched roof, and now the water seeps through the walls instead. The new house has an extra wing added to it that you didn't ask for, but as soon as you enter it the floor collapses, and if you try to save yourself you find door jammed.
Would you accept such nonsense? Of course not! You'd file complaints, you'd sue! But this is what Microsoft has been doing with their software products, and the user community has been taught to accept this.

Of course new releases are necessary if software is going to evolve at all. But are these new versions indeed as innovative as Microsoft would have us believe? Or is it merely a chance to integrate the separate Microsoft products more tightly and to increase the users' vendor dependence?
Let me put it this way: if a new version of an application comes with documents in Microsoft's .CHM format (a Microsoft-proprietary version of HTML, used for help files and such) I'm forced to install Internet Explorer (which means installing Outlook as well) because no other application correctly supports the .CHM format. The update file for HTML Help support (HHUPD.EXE) requires that IE3.02 or later be installed, but Microsoft advises the user to install IE5 and Outlook 5.) Since IE under Windows is designed to conflict with other browsers (e.g. Netscape Navigator) something as simple as online documentation in a "product update" forces me to discontinue competing products in favor of a Microsoft-only environment.
And what good is such an update, really? What are the innovations in, say, the '97 version of MS Office (Word '97, PowerPoint '97, Access '97, etc.) over previous versions? How do Office 2000 or XP represent innovation? The most significant 'improvement' is that all new versions produce documents that are incompatible with older versions of the same applications. If I create a document in a current version of MS-Word (e.g. Word 2000 or XP) and mail it to a friend who still uses an older version (say, Word '97), he cannot read it, view it, print it or anything else. He's forced to let Microsoft ram an unwanted upgrade down his throat before he can use my document.
And it doesn't stop there. Let's take a look at Office 2000. Quoting PC-World, June '99:

"An interesting issue is that Office2000's HTML format is incompatible to some extent with almost any other program, including MS's. So you can create all sorts of groovy Word, XL, or PP documents, and only people with Office2000 can read them. Even IE4 and 5, and Front Page 2000 can't read XL or PP files in HTML format without significant distortions in the display."

New releases of Microsoft products generally don't contain any significant innovations whatsoever. Still we have to keep buying new versions at steep prices in order to maintain document compatibility with our fellow users. Microsoft calls this "the freedom to innovate", and waxes poetic about "all this exciting new technology that has been invented by Microsoft".
As if the document's version-dependence wasn't enough, Microsoft also discontinues serious support for each product version soon after a new version is released. (Although by the end of 2002 Microsoft announced prolonged support in the future for their major products.) If you have problems with any Microsoft product, you are invariably encouraged to buy a new version, usually at a rather steep price. But when you do, you'll find that the bugs haven't been fixed, that new bugs have been introduced, and that all design flaws have been perpetuated.

Microsoft forces us to buy substandard, proprietary technology along with Windows. Take ADSI for example. The Active Directory capabilities in Windows 2000/XP are much harder to integrate into a multi-platform environment (e.g. in combination with Novell Netware or Unix systems) than the more primitive domain services (which could be taken care of by means of a simple redirection mechanism). Of course Microsoft has done little to facilitate the integration of ADSI with other products; ADSI is engineered to promote Microsoft-only environments; it's an immature product that can't handle multi-vendor or multi-platform environments and scales poorly.
After only a few months of use in the larger corporate environments, ADSI's limitations were already painfully obvious: only 5000 users per group, single points of authentication (which means that remote offices are dependent on the availability of WAN links for local log-on) and most painful of all: the lack of adequate record locking, which means that two simultaneous updates of one record will result in serious loss of data.
ADSI's limited scalability was again confirmed by the Gartner Group in August 2000: large corporations will suffer from excessive overhead and network load when implementing ADSI over, say, 300 offices or more (something that can be, and has been, successfully done with NDS). Microsoft's counterargument was that their own ADSI-based network contains some 39,000 PCs, but they neglected to mention that those PCs are scattered across multiple non-integrated domains. And of course this "metadirectory solution" touts being LDAP and ODBC compliant, but if you want an X.500 directory or a sync engine (other than MS DirSync) to talk to it, you'll need custom meta agents.
Draw your own conclusion; mine is that Microsoft has again released a half-baked product that hasn't been seriously thought through by qualified networking software architects, and no amount of patching or service packs will be able to remedy all the basic design flaws.
And of course real Active Directory support is available only on the Windows 2000 platform which doesn't have native NDS support, but still users will have to adopt it eventually. (Soon most applications and drivers will demand it, and of course Microsoft has already discontinued serious support and code maintenance for NT versions previous to XP.) Also, Microsoft has shamelessly admitted that the flaws in ADSI mentioned above would not be fixed before Windows XP, thereby effectively forcing large customers to accept another mandatory "upgrade" and of course even more vendor-dependent features.
So much for freedom of choice.

Microsoft has always claimed that the bundling of application software with Windows was only intended to improve quality, and that consumers are better served by the fact that both operating system and applications are produced by the same company. Well, we've seen how that goes. Word Perfect was a better word processor than MS-Word ever was (read: it delivered a better quality of word processing, whereas Word only contains more gadgetry). But when Windows 3 was released, few application developers had caught up with the need to entirely rewrite their application code. Only the Microsoft Applications Group was ready. It turned out that the latest release of Word at the time was fully compatible with Windows as soon as it hit the market, while WP Corp. struggled to get their DOS-version ported to Windows - with an unsurprising lack of success, as they had previously been forced to write DOS-dependency into the program code due to DOS's lack of decent device support. And WP Corp. wasn't the only one: when Windows was first released most competing software vendors soon discovered that porting their existing DOS applications to Windows looked easier than it was, and that nothing less than a complete re-write was needed in order to produce efficient and stable code. It's also common knowledge that MS applications perform much better under Windows than competing products ever can, since MS controls the API (Application Program Interface) and uses undocumented features to enhance their own products. Compare Netscape Navigator and MS Internet Explorer, for example: IE hooks directly into Windows' internals while Netscape is limited to documented API calls.) Still Microsoft denies having an unfair advantage over competing developers of application software and calls it "The Freedom To Innovate".

Let's take a good look at this idea. Are a monopoly and the bundling of products really conducive to innovation?
Imagine for a moment that Standard Oil hadn't been stopped by the Sherman Anti-trust Act at the beginning of the 20th century, and had gone on to seize complete control of the fuel market. Let me stretch your imagination even further: suppose Standard Oil had also bought the Ford Motor Company. Owning virtually every gas station around, SO could have switched to a type of fuel uniquely suited for their own automobile products, and less well suited (and eventually unsuited) for competing cars. Consumers would have had no choice but to switch to SO-powered Ford automobiles. Both competing fuel vendors and automobile manufacturers would have been history.
If this had actually happened, what would car traffic look like these days? Think about it: would we have had a wide choice from affordable, safe and dependable mass-produced cars running 50 miles to a gallon? Or would we be driving a glorified Model T instead, in any color as long as it's black, at the original price or more, corrected for a century of inflation? (Today most people can afford a car. A century ago automobiles were far beyond most peoples' budgets.) And what would we pay for a full tank of gas, with oil prices being whatever the sole supplier says they are?
This is why monopolies and the wholesale bundling of products are bad. To illustrate: In November 2003 Microsoft declared a quarterly turnover of $2.81 billion (!) for their Windows division, with a $2.26 billion net profit. Read: an 80.5% net profit margin on a multi-billion dollar turnover. MS-Office did slightly less well, with a mere $1.63 billion net profit, on revenue of $2.29 billion. On 30 September 2003 Microsoft had $51.62 billion on the books. And this at a time when the entire ICT industry can't afford to spend any money that can possibly be saved!
But that's what happens if a monopolist has been allowed to eliminate all serious competitors. By contrast, other Microsoft divisions such as Home Entertainment still have to compete with other players in the market, and these divisions declared losses up to a few hundred million dollars.

An important principle in Microsoft's marketing is that it's far more important what the customer thinks he's getting rather than what's actually being delivered. Another major strategy is to hide the fact that Microsoft can never deliver what they promise, so that the customer will keep purchasing new versions over and over again.
Of course hardball sales tactics have never been the exclusive domain of any one corporate software company. And all is fair in love, war and marketing... Or is it? What about foul play? What about the distinction between competition, the prevalence of sales targets over ethics, and illegal practices?
For most of the past decade Microsoft has been the subject of investigation by the US Department of Justice. This has culminated in the late nineties with the so-called anti-trust trials. The testimony from Microsoft's competitors was especially interesting to hear. IBM, for example, declared that they had been forced to drop OS/2 when Microsoft threatened to raise their prices for Windows OEM licenses. Netscape was given the choice between surrendering or getting trampled. (Netscape resisted, and Microsoft started an offensive to "cut off Netscape's oxygen supply". Internet Explorer was integrated with Windows, and only a takeover by AOL and SUN kept Netscape alive.) Digital Research demonstrated how Windows 3.11 was tweaked to crash when running on top of DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS. And the list goes on and on.
Microsoft claimed in defense that this was all "innovation" and that the integration of Internet Explorer was a technical necessity. The Department of Justice (DoJ) then went on to demonstrate that this was a blatant lie, and made short work of Microsoft's entire defense plea. Microsoft in turn didn't even manage to present credible witnesses; all those who testified either had a significant interest in Microsoft or could be put at a significant disadvantage by Microsoft. Ironically, Microsoft's own witnesses, and even Gates' own testimonies, did their own case more harm than good.

On 5 November 1999 the DoJ published their Findings of Fact, and concludes, to condense the original document into a nutshell, that Microsoft has used foul play, has manipulated the market, has impeded progress, has harmed the IT market, the user community and consumers, and has violated anti-trust regulations:

"The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur, for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft's self-interest."

On 3 April 2000, the DoJ went on to state their Conclusions of Law and Final Order, leaving even less to the imagination:

"[Software bundling] cannot truly be explained as an attempt to benefit consumers and improve the efficiency of the software market generally, but rather as part of a larger campaign to quash innovation that threatened [Microsoft's] monopoly position. [...]
In essence, Microsoft mounted a deliberate assault upon entrepreneurial efforts that, left to rise or fall on their own merits, could well have enabled the introduction of competition into the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems [...] thereby effectively guaranteeing its continued dominance in the relevant market. More broadly, Microsoft's anticompetitive actions trammeled [sic] the competitive process through which the computer software industry generally stimulates innovation and conduces to the optimum benefit of consumers."

I won't bore you with the rest of the legalese (which you can read for yourself, if you're so inclined, in the original document) but the bottom line is that Microsoft was found guilty as charged.
This ruling was in part (not in whole) reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals and sent back to a lower court for reevaluation, not because the facts that led to the initial ruling were invalid (the court unanimously found that Microsoft engaged in unlawful conduct to maintain its dominant position in the operating systems market) but mainly on the grounds of unprofessional conduct by judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who discussed his personal feelings about the case in the press immediately after the ruling. Although Microsoft claimed victory after this partial reversal of the original ruling, the essence of that ruling still stands, and Microsoft has still been found guilty of illegal monopolist practices and other unlawful conduct, such as:

• Exclusive agreements with PC manufacturers to bundle Microsoft products
• Overruling the users' decision to use Netscape Navigator
• Mixing Windows and browser code to prevent the removal of Internet Explorer
• Agreements with ISP's to exclusively promote Internet Explorer
• Exclusive agreements with developers to create software that forces Internet Explorer to be the default browser
• Making Internet Explorer the exclusive browser on the Apple platform, by threatening to halt the development of MS Office for MacOS
• Lying to Java developers about Microsoft Java being cross-platform
• Pressuring Intel to discontinue development of their own cross-platform Java

Shortly after this ruling Microsoft suddenly lifted the ban on the shipping of competing application software with Windows by PC manufacturers. This gesture was part of their attempts to mend their fences with the DoJ, but it's too little and much too late to make any real difference as far as the IT market is concerned.
The release version of Windows XP proved to be nothing more than a continuation of Microsoft's monopolistic and anti-competitive practices. After being found guilty of forcing Netscape (now AOL Time Warner) out of the market with Internet Explorer and HTML, they continued the practice against Real Networks, and they are thumbing their nose at the DoJ and at AOL Time Warner by bundling MSN Messenger and MediaPlayer with the OS. You cannot have Windows XP without MSN Messenger, and it is cumbersome to install either of the other Instant Messaging Services into Windows XP. RealPlayer has already lost much of its market share to the bundled MediaPlayer, and is likely to be the next victim of Microsoft's product bundling strategies and suffer the same fate as Netscape did. How long do we have before people give up on AIM or ICQ?
Even consumer organizations are getting worried now, as shown in a study by four major consumer organizations in the US in September 2001.
In the aftermath of the legal wrangling that followed, both Gates and Ballmer claimed, and repeated, that it is technically impossible to remove application software like Internet Explorer and Media Player from the Windows distribution, and that Microsoft would have to take Windows off the market if a court order forced them to remove it anyway. This is of course nonsense. Microsoft has always claimed to be able to make anything that can be called software, and they have never refrained from doing so. They can put anything into Windows they want, and now they're unable to remove something from it and to implement a workaround to deal with any side effects? Oh come on.
And true enough, by the end of May 2002 Microsoft announced, in response to earlier legal settlements, that Windows XP Service Pack 1 would incorporate changes to allow consumers and PC makers to override Microsoft's default media products, and replace them with products from Microsoft's competitors, such as AOL Time Warner and RealNetworks. After systematically lying about the impossibility of doing so, and Steve Ballmer's rather hyperbolic statements about having to take Windows off the market if Microsoft was ever forced to do so, it turns out that Microsoft can simply take care of it with nothing more than a service pack. That should tell us two things.
First, Microsoft admits having lied about this for years. (So what else have they lied about? They said Media Player could not be overridden. They also said, in court, that Internet Explorer couldn't be overridden. Perjury is such a nasty word, don't you think?) Second, Microsoft's claims about how this puts an end to unfair conduct and anti-competitive monopolist practices should be seen against a long history of consistent lying. We should not be surprised to discover that Microsoft's removal of the offending components is limited to hiding the associated icons. In any case, we'd better not expect miracles. At least not if the beta version of Media Player 9 is any indication: beta testers found that after installing Media Player 9, the application could not be removed from Windows ME and XP. Removing it from earlier versions of Windows is no problem, but in Windows ME and XP Media Player 9 replaces parts of the OS. Even Service Pack 1 can be uninstalled, but MP9 can't. Furthermore, Windows XP Service Pack 1 also makes other changes to the system to make Windows 'in compliance' with recent court rulings concerning Microsoft's illegal monopolistic actions. The change made to Outlook Express is especially interesting in this respect. It enables a setting that is disabled by default. It has to do (supposedly) with the way Outlook Express prevents potentially dangerous file attachments to be opened or saved. When this feature is enabled (as is the result of installing XP service pack 1) Microsoft's competitors' documents are labeled as dangerous. In particular, Adobe Acrobat 4.0 document attachments are tagged as dangerous. However, the number one virus carrier in the world --Microsoft Word Documents with macros-- are not blocked...
In short, it's still business as usual.
Ironically, after having testified in April 2002 that too many versions of Windows would be bad for consumers and for competition, since then Microsoft has essentially doubled--to about two dozen--the number of "current" versions of the operating system software. Between November 2002 and April 2003, for example, Microsoft has released three new versions of Windows XP alone. This should tell us a lot about the trustworthiness of Microsoft's testimonies...

Let's face it: even after officially being found guilty, Microsoft has little to fear. The sad truth is that the company has grown too big to be seriously affected by something as trivial as law and order. Microsoft could buy large portions of the United States if they wished to. Microsoft could buy several small countries. Microsoft knows the inside of the software that powers much of the world's economy; software that runs on government computers, including those used by the DoJ, the CIA, FBI and KGB...
But I digress. Suffice it to note that, according to a study by Common Cause, Microsoft has spent over $16 million on political lobbying, doling out large sums across a wide spectrum of political activities since 1997. And 16 million is a mere pittance for Microsoft. Should the political climate turn unfavorable, I'm sure a few hundred million could easily be reallocated from the marketing budget to politics.
As much as I applaud the efforts of the DoJ to expose the practices of Microsoft for what they really are, I have to admit it's always been unlikely that effective action against Microsoft would ever be taken, and that the DoJ's ideas on how to make Microsoft cease and desist (e.g. the proposal that the company be broken up into different business units) would have the desired result, or even that such measures would actually be enforced. When the dust settled, Microsoft was still standing, grinning and raising a finger at the world, the user community and a powerless DoJ.
To illustrate: in January 2003 Microsoft settled one of their big anti-trust cases in California. Under the terms of the settlement, Microsoft agreed to pay back $1.1 billion to their customers. If part of that sum is not claimed, Microsoft will donate 2/3 of the remainder to schools, under the condition that at least half of the donation be spent on Microsoft products.
Hang on -- how's that again? Microsoft promises not to do it again... as they have done so many times before without keeping their promise even once. Then they'll spend 1.1 billion dollars-- a sum that won't make a big dent in their annual revenues. Since in cases like this usually less than 25% of the money is claimed, they'll end up using a big part of it to give away to schools and have those schools convert it into free software, thereby eliminating the competition in just about the only market that Microsoft hasn't managed to monopolize yet. And they get away with it.
Something's very wrong here.

And nothing will change. Things will just continue to get worse. Even after the DoJ's ruling, all available evidence suggests that Microsoft persists in practices that have been found unlawful. The second beta version of Whistler (the development code name for Windows XP) came with built-in versions of Internet Explorer 6 and Windows Media Player 8 so tightly integrated into the system that they're practically hard-coded, right after the DoJ's ruling.
No matter how spectacular the innovations by competing vendors (e.g. Netscape or RealNetworks) may be, the chances that they will be able to offer us these innovations so that we may benefit from them are practically zero, since competing (and probably conflicting) software will already have been forced upon us with the installation of Windows. In Windows XP, for example, the media players from Apple (Quicktime) and RealNetworks (RealPlayer) won't work any more, for no apparent reason. The user has to download patches or updates from Apple or RealNetworks in order to get these players to work. And Windows XP comes bundled with tons of multimedia applications to start with, of course.
Even during many trials, Microsoft shows no signs of cleaning up their act. Arguing that conduct remedies were insufficient to stop Microsoft's anti-competitive and unlawful conduct, the DoJ reported that on July 11, 1999, "Bill Gates wrote an E-mail directing that Microsoft redesign its software to harm competitors" who make personal digital appliances. It indicated "a willingness to change the details of its Office applications to favor devices that run on Windows, even if doing so would disadvantage other customers who now rely on the Palm Pilot", officials said. The department noted that this was less than 30 days after the company's 78-day trial ended, in which it was accused of using similar tactics against Netscape and others. (Microsoft went on to release PocketPC, the successor to the Windows-CE operating system for hand-held devices. Initially the above allegation of unlawful conduct was denied, but then Microsoft requested that Gates' E-mail be placed under court's seal.)
The near future doesn't look very promising either. A leaked-out beta version of Internet Explorer 6 contained hardcoded links to Microsoft websites and appeared to be designed as an integral part of Windows (to be more precise, at the time it didn't look like IE6 would be available as a separate product and would be impossible to remove from Windows). Although IE6 was released as a separate product after all, this was undoubtedly part of Microsoft's latest plans: the Microsoft.Net initiative, a strategy to bind customers to Microsoft on a day-to-day basis.
.Net will target (read: attempt to appropriate) Internet Services, and promises to introduce even more proprietary standards than before. Microsoft still owns the proprietary API's (the documentation they released as part of a legal settlement in August 2002 was incomplete and virtually worthless, not to mention full of errors that were obviously the result of sloppiness rather than of malicious intent). Therefore Microsoft controls what will work or not for third-party software. During Microsoft's announcement of their new Internet strategy, Bill Gates conceded that "while all .Net devices will have access to Microsoft's .Net infrastructure, those based on the Microsoft Windows platform will work better". Sounds familiar?
If you haven't got the full picture by now: Gates told the audience at the MS Developer Conference on 13 July 2000 that, quote, "the next two releases of Windows is where you'll see .Net built into the user interfaces.", unquote. He went on to outline "the most profound changes in the User Interface" that can be expected in the near future. "Remember it's Microsoft we're talking about," said an official with one of Microsoft's software partners, who requested anonymity. "Microsoft's number one priority in the post-Windows-2000 era is the same -- to make sure all devices are Microsoft-based."
As a taste of things to come, MSN users noted in October 2001 that MSN suddenly required the use of Internet Explorer. Users of other (competing) browsers were redirected to a webpage where they could download IE. After considerable public pressure Microsoft dropped this requirement (thereby proving that there was no technical necessity for such a browser-dependency, but that it was a commercial issue only). However, a Microsoft spokesman warned that users of competing browsers would have a "slightly diminished experience" because non-MS browsers "do not support MSN's HTML standard". Go figure.

Some examples of untruth in Microsoft marketing are even funny. In the first months of 2002, Microsoft (along with partner Unisys) put up a website with the title "We have the way out". This website was part of a campaign that used slogans such as "Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system." The ICT community was vastly amused: this website runs on Apache and Free BSD Unix. While touting the advantages of Windows over Unix, Microsoft knows how little truth their is in their own statements and relies on Unix instead of Windows. They won't eat their own dogfood - after all they know what's in it. (Later this website was ported to IIS on Windows 2000, but by then everyone already knew about it, of course.) And in August 2003 Microsoft changed its DNS so that requests for www.microsoft.com no longer resolve to machines on Microsoft's own network, but instead are handled by the Akamai caching system, which runs Linux.

On top of all this, Microsoft continues to, how shall I put it, adhere to rather peculiar ideas of what's true and what isn't. Spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) and other forms of misinformation is normal business routine for Microsoft. For example, on 22 December 1999 the Microsoft website blandly stated that:

"These are just a few of the features Windows 2000 Server offers that aren't found in NetWare:
Integrated namespace support, file compression, configurable block size, mirroring, duplexing, striping with or without parity, removable device support, link tracking, integrated content indexing, user-definable file properties and a tracking log to audit storage services utilization."

I have recently been forced to acquire A+ certification. The content of the exam was weak at best and tested a minimum of skills (after using their prep materials I STILL hadn't found a good explanation of memory timings, but that didn't stop me from getting a perfect score on the exam). It wasn't the sloppiness of the exam that bothered me, though...it was the fact that the whole curriculum is used to peddle M$ as the champion of computing (or as the only existing option) and Windows as the only OS a "professional" would consider.
M$ through their puppet companies (CompTIA, PrepLogic, etc...) use these exams as written infomercials, and they LIE to do it. Example: The PrepLogic Network+ practice exam has a question that asks which Network Operating Systems are X.500 (LDAP) compliant-- apparently Windows NT 4's NTDS and Windows 2000 Active Directory are FULLY X.500 compliant, while "Linux in any flavor does not have a directory service of this type"... Go figure - the LDAP daemon I run dailly doesn't exist!!!

In November 2001 Microsoft spread more lies when they published a whitepaper on their website that compared Embedded Windows XP with embedded Linux. Among other inaccuracies, the paper touted the superiority of embedded XP, called it "proven performance and reliability" (blithely ignoring the fact that XP is Windows and therefore known for its unreliability, and that XP is brand new and barely tested). It claimed that Linux is "a follower, not an innovator", based on the fact that Microsoft continues to integrate support for new "standards" in their products that the Open Source community struggles to keep up with.
Nor is this the only example of the way Microsoft attempts to distort reality. On 14 February 2001, MS's Windows Operating System chief, Jim Allchin, stated that freely distributed software code such as rival Linux could stifle innovation and that legislators need to understand the threat. The result [of Open Source initiatives] will be the demise of both intellectual property rights and the incentive to spend on research and development, Allchin claimed. He went on to call Open Source an intellectual-property destroyer, and stated that nothing could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. In May 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated in an interview that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". And to top it all off, the user license for the second beta version of Microsoft's Mobile Internet Toolkit comes with a condition that the product not be used "in combination with potentially viral software". The document goes on to name examples of what Microsoft calls "potentially viral software": software that is distributed under the Gnu Public License (the most common license for Open Source software) but also the Lesser General Public License, the Mozilla Public License and the Sun Industry Standards License.
And in the meantime Microsoft's marketing continues to make groundless promises. Windows Server 2003 is being marketed as a huge cost saver. Advertising campaigns promise (without qualification) that you'll "save a nickel on every transaction" just by switching to Windows Server 2003, or that you'll reduce the complexity of your infrastructure by implementing Active Directory and "save two million dollars a year". Of course such unqualified promises are meaningless without being put into any context (such as what kind of infrastructure and ICT environment you have) but that's all irrelevant when Microsoft salesmen step into the boardroom. Another distorted aspect of the whole Windows Server 2003 campaign to "do more with less" is Microsoft's announcement that their latest and greatest will save you "millions of dollars" because now users can restore their own accidentally deleted documents. A great feature! Users of Novell Netware especially will appreciate it. After all, they've been using Netware's SALVAGE features since the 1980's. If this simple feature alone is supposed to save millions on user support, does that make Windows 2003 a must-have? Microsoft would like us to think so. Windows' lack of such an elementary feature and the extra millions wasted as a result are of course never mentioned.

Decades of non-innovation and monopolist practices, legal procedures and finally a ruling by the DoJ. Nothing but rewrapped old technology, misinformation, FUD and lies on a web page aimed at wannabee marketroids to tell them how to convince their customers that Windows is a Good Thing. Suggestions that IP is a Microsoft protocol, a claim that the integration of Internet Explorer in Windows '98 is a technical necessity, unrealistic promises about saving costs and increasing reliability, and attempts to paint the Open Source community as being fascist.
Lies, lies and more lies. In fact Microsoft has been proven guilty of most of the things they accuse their rivals of, and then some. Can you say "dishonest"?

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