>>>Remember "embrace, extend, extinguish"? Remember the years of FUD about open source? Remember taking over Fox user groups and conferences in an attempt to hijack them into becoming dot net? Remember the impossible patent requirements? Remember Digital Research and the "we'll let you, dealers, sell MS-DOS for only $30 if you sign here that you will not sell machines with DR-DOS"?
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>>>It's not a "successful company", it's not envy. It's just anger towards the mountain of illegal stuff these thugs got away with.
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>>Whoa, Mr. Dragon.
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>>1. I don't know what user groups and conferences Microsoft took over. In fact by the time .NET rolled out they were getting out of UG and conference support, not into it. For a number of years DevCons were bankrolled by Microsoft. That stopped sometime near the end of the 90s and FoxPro Advisor magazine took up the role.
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>Which doesn't contradict what I said. Microsoft is not a one-track railway station. On one track, they may stop supporting user groups. On the other, there was a report from someone in Canada about how their local Microsoft simply took over their meetings, paid for something and turned the agenda into dot net - taking over their time and place. Stripped of all code that could be used elsewhere (Rushmore, developer features, cursor engine etc), Fox has two large features left: developer base and Sergey. Developer base was seriously and constantly pushed into the dot net pen. Read the last ten years of UT, if you don't remember.

Stop supporting user groups? Example, please. Some user group in Canada whose meetings were taken over by Microsoft? Specifics, please.

Stopped of all code that could be used elsewhere? Do you expect them to just give it away? That's a trend now but it wasn't at the time. You are speaking like a communist.

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>>2. And here I thought open source came from entirely different groups, with MS conspicuously late to the party. Please enlighten me if I am mistaken.
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>Find Microsoft's spin on ROI of Windows+Office vs Linux+Ooo (or some such stack of OS+apps), from around 2002 - they somehow calculated that free is more expensive.
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>At about the same time, they introduced the clause in the EULA of pretty much everything whereas you are in a breech of contract if you benchmark their software on an unapproved platform plus some other conditions, boiling down to "you can't use a stop watch unless we stack the odds to our liking".
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>>3. Digital Research was about a million years ago and Microsoft consisted of a few dozen employees.
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>My memory has no statute of limitations. I don't care if it was in cenozoic, it was still illegal, blackmail etc.
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>Few dozen? At the time they were selling millions of copies of MS-DOS? At the time when they were able to blackmail the vendors? My serious doubts there.
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>> Maybe they were a little ruthless about it but they were hungry.
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>So they were killing competitors which were far better - writing better software (when pressed on an issue of a minor incompatibility between MS-DOS and DR DOS, one of the top guys from DR said "we didn't feel like emulating all of Microsoft's bugs"), having far better business ethics, thereby slashing jobs all over the market, and that's "little ruthless"?
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>Like Larry Niven would say, TANJ.
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>> They were not yet a successful company with tens of thousands of employees. At least in folklore, Gary Kildall of DR skipped a meeting with IBM to go flying and the rest is history.
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>>4. I don't know what patent requirements you mean.
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>Try to find out why every other system has problems trying to write to a NTFS partition. Even the specs for the filesystem to which you trust your data (and, unfortunately, so do I) is not documented. The specs sometimes go out, but only when they are already obsolete, and even then, they are incomplete.
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>Or the standard for docx files... which is defined as "whatever Word does".
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>http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9036058/Microsoft_changes_Windows_files_on_user_PCs_without_permission_researchers_say?source=rss_news50
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>or, for a much more benign case, http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/D0BC712B-7DBA-46CA-AA44-19376E64FBA6.html