Adam Barr has a nice perspective on Microsoft’s reputation :
In an early version of chapter 2 of their blogging book, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel wrote, “Since the late 1970s, Microsoft has been perceived as a company at war with competitors and governments, whose products have been scorned almost as universally as they have been adopted.”
I don’t think this is true. Consider the beginning of the year 1990. Windows 3.0 had not shipped; Microsoft was selling DOS and working on the next version of OS/2 with IBM. In word processing, spreadsheets, database, and networking, it was far behind an entrenched competitor. Visual Basic had not shipped, and its development tools were weak. Microsoft was being sued by Apple over the “look and feel” of Windows, but the case involved the extent of a license that Microsoft had signed with Apple, not accusations of out-and-out theft (and Apple at the time was also a much larger company than Microsoft). The US Federal Trade Commission was also investigating Microsoft over allegations that it had conspired with IBM to limit features in Windows in favor of OS/2, but that wasn’t yet public knowledge. ….
[Read the whole blog at : Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters]
