HooterNanny said:
On the internet, there seems to be a fair amount of dislike for Microsoft, not specifically on this site, but on lots of other sites, people seem to have a problem with the company, where gaming and xbox is concerned.
Personally, I think that Microsoft does a really good job, the console itself is fantastic, and the Xbox Live service itself works really well. Online play is smooth, the marketplace works fantastically, they support lots of other avenues, like Facebook, Netflix, and the indie games section is especially cool for smaller time developers who want to get their games on Xbox.
The main thing I see though, is while people mention the bad things that they do, they never seem to mention the good things. The deals of the week tend to be good, i know i've purchased many games or add ons through that, and while they charge for the ability to play online with others, it's not exactly an unfair price. And
Just wondering what peoples opinions are on Microsoft, are they the giant money grabbing conglomerate many make them out to be, or do you think that all the criticism is undeserved?
I would say this has nothing to do with the Xbox. Hatred for Microsoft goes back a long way.
It was already rampant in 1995.
The basis of that hatred originally tended to focus about the way Microsoft conducted it's business.
Which, essentially is summed up in the phrase "Embrace, extend, Extinguish."
Which is,
Embrace: Buy out your competition.
Extend: If they refuse, copy all their good ideas, then extend them slightly.
Extinguish: Then, use your control over the PC, and huge resources compared to most competitors, to drive them out of business by any means nessesary.
Then, when the competition is gone, Microsoft is left with no competition, and no need to do much of anything to improve their software.
See: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office... Microsoft Internet explorer - For products that have at least for part of their history successfully pulled off this concept.
(Windows made Apple into a niche product for a long time, but also Crushed OS2, and a long list of other OS options. Even DOS was a known ripoff of an OS called CP/M, which failed.
Microsoft office abused undocumented features of the windows API to do things no competitor could match, then ensured it's document format became standard, and more or less unreadable by any competitor.
Internet explorer seriously undermined netscape by being bundled with windows, but also in the way that it was embedded so deeply into the system it couldn't be removed, even if you didn't want it.)
There's plenty of examples of dubious things microsoft has done in the past, and people have rightfully hated them because of it.
Of course, it isn't really fair, because plenty of companies are just as bad, if not worse (Apple, I'm looking at you here), and get away with it with not even the vaguest hint of criticism.
But, I guess that's the price paid for being the biggest fish in the pond. (Google is starting to suffer for it now, despite it's 'do no evil' mantra...)
