Comment Articles

What is it about Microsoft?

Charles Cooper CNET News

Published: 16 Aug 2004 15:30 BST

The Monday morning missive got right to the point:

"I find it simultaneously strange, amazing and utterly incomprehensible that your news publications continue to write business articles about Microsoft that appear to elevate and lend credibility to their organisation. It's almost as if I am reading something coming out of the Pyongyang press!"

There's no doubt that Kim Jong-il longs to direct technology coverage at CNET News.com, though I can assure one and all that neither the dear leader nor any of his comrades are in line to direct our editorial operations any time soon.

The email was not altogether exceptional, when you consider how Microsoft has become a latter-day Rorschach test for people who are passionate about their technology.

But it takes on a larger context when you tally in years of Microsoft-hating feedback detailing the enormity of this single company's misdeeds.

Sociologists would need to spend years getting to a root explanation, but this much is incontestable: there's a certain something about this particular company that pushes some folks over the edge.

Microsoft-bashing was in vogue long before the US Department of Justice hauled the company into court on antitrust charges in 1998. Some trace the resentment to the storied 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in which a 21-year-old Gates publicly chastised a group of developers for pirating his software. The backlash was immediate. (Paying for software? What a whiner!)

The label stuck. In time, Gates -- and by extension, Microsoft -- came to be viewed through a different prism. Unlike other early PC entrepreneurs doing their thing to make the world a better place for humanity, Microsoft got slammed for conducting business like marauding Huns. They were without morals, they were without ethics and on top of everything else, they made lousy software.

Even the anarchists got pissed at Gates, nailing him a few years ago with a cream pie.

Microsoft has public-relations baggage that's hard to shake. And as the technology industry's most famous convicted predatory monopolist, the company will never again win the benefit of the doubt. Still, the psycho nature of the conspiracy theorists is something to behold.