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On 8 Jan, 2013, at 12:58 am, bad apple wrote:
[MS occasionaly write] good software, that enough other people also think is good that Microsoft is the biggest IT shop in the world
No, we've established how they came to be largest: an IBM foul-up. And even then MS didn't have the product they promised; they hoodwinked the creator out of it just in time to deliver.
and runs a massive percentage of all computers out there. Just outright dismissing them as evil and useless seems... well, frankly, a little bit crazy.
So I've got to bend over backwards to find something nice to say about someone ostentatiously evil, or I'm nuts? I'll go with nuts.
I'll give just one little,nuanced example: the MS team responsible for SMB fully co-operated withthe Samba team over years to help implement the latest, greatest v4.
Oh dear. Some of the nuances may have escaped you. The one little nuanced example you chose proves the opposite of what you purport! The internal MS team maintaining SMB admitted that they used the better- structured, better-documented SAMBA code to "reverse-reverse-engineer" things they needed to do to improve SMB, which was virtually unmaintainable and very buggy. QED.
That's not to say some other well-founded but paltry example of MS competence or acceptable behavior can't be found. They're still crap and crooked.
Nuanced is as nuanced does. It's an RMS kind of thing. Sometimes things are nuanced, sometimes they aren't. Sometimes there is no other side to the story. I'm absolutely right about MS, but it's taken as "wrong" to speak in absolutes. Until it becomes obvious, at which point you say "Well, of course we all know he was right about that, and thank goodness someone had the guts and the vision to stick it out when everyone else was worried about scaring the horses, but everything else he says is obviously extremist and unbalanced". Ho hum. I used to get the same thing about apartheid, though you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who remembers condemning my "extremism" about that now. We were all actively opposed to apartheid, right? Phooey. As Gandhi said, "If you are in a minority of one, the truth is the truth."
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