Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

Almost every person I have ever met who <i>hates</i> Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original thoughts) or had a specific beef in one area that they let inform their thoughts about the company as a whole.<p>Lots of web developers, especially those who were not professional developers in the 90s see and hear this horror story of a big mean monopolist who set out to destroy Netscape. It is funny how history chooses the more salacious of headlines, easy to forget that IE4 was a breakthrough browser that ate Navigator's lunch heads up. Certainly the OS integration made a big difference but this picture of an evil lurking monster hoisting terrible code and practices upon us is and never was true.<p>The other thing I think which happens is group opinions get formed. Microsoft is strongest in the enterprise, which is more apt to say - big businesses. Big business and the entreprenuerial hacker/dev dont get along, bigbiz in large part wants and fosters a need for programmers. Their hierarchical and red tape laden structure destroys creative spirit so what you get is lots of people who accept this, learn within that framework and dont really develop beyond the skills needed for their job. They latch onto Access and VB and do it badly because no one with great skills taught them any better and their bosses just need X to work and performance or elegance dont matter at all. This mindset gets associated with Microsoft people and the non-MSFT crowd begins to think anyone who does Microsoft work is some mindless noob with no skills.<p>It is sad really, because Microsoft is years ahead of any other company in the way they treat developers. If you havent used Visual Studio you wont understand that.

Programmers generally don't hate Microsoft. They have one of the biggest (if not, THE) developer communities in existence. Developers have great access to outstanding developer documentation, engineers (channel9.msdn.com), and Microsoft lets its engineers blog candidly (blogs,msdn.com).<p>The same complaints the article cited could be levied against gcc, autoconf, and so on. And you could levy the same trollbaiting against Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X. Because for any given thing, there is somebody out in the world who feels the need to hate it.<p>I do a lot of .NET development and I love it, but I prefer developing on a UNIX environment because I started there and ended up on DOS/Windows later on.

I don't think Microsoft executives are losing sleep over "Microsoft Hatred" as much as they are losing sleep over "Microsoft Irrelevance". How many college students know how to program on Win32? How many even know what Win32 is? In 10 years, these college students will be the senior developers at their respective companies.<p>Certainly, any good engineer will choose the best tool for the job. But I find it unlikely that those that know little of MS technology will promote those tools later in their careers.<p>/* What is Microsoft? */

I think a big reason why people don't like Microsoft, is the anti-competitive behavior they used to get to the size they are today. A lot of people dream of starting a business one day (especially around here), and when a company was built by crushing start-ups/small businesses in illegitimate ways, people aren't going to be too happy about that.<p>Plus, they have that little paperclip thing that pops up whenever you ask for help...

I'm a programmer. Going back a few years, I hate Microsoft because:<p>* 8.3<p>* 16-bit address space<p>* Insanely complicated and needlessly POSIX-incompatible access control lists<p>* Registry<p>* Path separator: \ vs /<p>* Very expensive dev tools<p>* MSC++ isn't C++<p>* Handling of Java<p>* Management via GUI instead of text files<p>* Absence of usable shell<p>Yes, this list is way out of date. But these are the issues chased me out of the Microsoft world into Unix, Linux and open source. The few times I've had to deal with Microsoft software more recently (e.g. ACLs), the experience has served only to renew my loathing.

Linux comes with Apache, Python, C/C++, Perl, AWK, sed, vi, emacs, and more.<p>Windows comes with Minesweeper.<p>When I was starting out there was no Microsoft or Linux. I got a machine that had a programming lanuage built in to it, and I could write programs.<p>Pretty much the first large program I wrote was a compiler to convert a subset of BASIC into Z80. It was written in its own subset, and could compile itself. I hacked into the cassette save routines, smashed the stack, bootstrapped into a machine code monitor (not even assembler) that I wrote, and I was writing games for people to play.<p>It's always seemed to me that Microsoft almost actively prevented me from using my own machine. I couldn't get into it without buying more. And more. I wrote my own OS that sat on top of DOS, then write a compiler for that, and suddenly I could write games again. And finance applications. And mathematical explorations.<p>I found some of the first Perrin pseudo-primes that way, bypassing Microsoft's systems because they prevented me from doind what I wanted with the resources I had access to.<p>I don't hate Microsoft, but every time I use a Windows box it fails in interesting ways, costing me time, effort, patience and occasionally yet more money.<p>I'll use Linux.<p>ADDED IN EDIT AFTER RE-READING: And I'll continue to contribute to various open-source projects.

Anti-competitive, design-by-committee, aversion towards open source, corporate culture, bureaucratic, etc.<p>I don't <i>hate</i> Microsoft but I avoid targeting their platforms.<p>EDIT: Oh, and there's the malware thing.

Microsoft has done a lot of harm in the last 20 years. They succeeded through a strategy of continually expanding into new areas (operating systems, office software, web browsers, email, programming languages, etc) and producing products that often worked poorly and only with the rest of their platform. They succeeded at this for a time, creating a monstrous shambling behemoth of software that was powered entirely by its own momentum. But it wasn't very good, and everyone knew it.<p>I assume that others, like me, were very frustrated during that time. We knew this wasn't the right way. Software folks tend to see the world through software eyes, and we know that an incompatible proprietary mess only comes back to haunt you. But what could we do? They had the money and the influence. To misquote PG, we bought it with misgivings. We made our sites work with IE, we made our code compile under VC++, we gave our servers and clients special_microsoft_spec_exception flags. And we bitched on Slashdot and spelled Microsoft with a dollar sign and dreamed of a day when we wouldn't have to deal with it anymore.<p>Well, now we don't. Apple's eating Microsoft's lunch from the hardware up, while Google chows on it from the web down. They have way too much money to fail fast, or maybe to even fail at all. But they have to play ball now. Why do programmers hate Microsoft? Justice, I suppose. They certainly didn't treat us well when they were in charge. Programmers have long memories.

This claim is absurd. In the last few years Microsoft has done more to advance the state-of-the-art in programming languages for practicing developers than any other organization.<p>In terms of industrial languages, C# and the .NET framework are a huge advance for client-side programmers developing Windows GUI applications compared to C++. They sponsor the open source development of IronPython and IronRuby and make a genuine effort to maintain compatibility w/ the reference C implementations.<p>As for functional languages, they largely sponsor the development of Haskell by paying Simon Peyton-Jones who works for Microsoft Research (<a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/" rel="nofollow">http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/</a>), and have released F# which is by far the best commercially supported functional language.<p>Of course the trade off is that their languages work best, or only, with Windows, but if you are stuck programming on Windows, Microsoft is going out of its way to give developers a lot of options in languages.

There are lots of programmers who like Microsoft, mostly those whose primary (and often only) target is Windows. Most of the comments are about cross-platform issues and kinda boil down to "…because it's not Unix". Which is the "The whole world's a VAX" of our times.

1) Internet Explorer 6<p>2) Internet Explorer 7<p>3) Price/quality of Visual Studio compared to other offerings - we can talk about memory footprint, MSDN subscriptions, odd versioning conflicts when trying to develop for SharePoint - oh wait.<p>4) SharePoint<p>5) <a href="http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/fake-steve-ballmer.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/fake-steve-ballmer.jpg</a> Honestly, this man disgusts me. His attitude and public reactions as the figurehead of Microsoft make me want to have nothing to do with Microsoft<p>6) Lack of POSIX compliant shell.<p>7) In small companies (and most families), programmers end up being IT staff. When was the last time any of you had to reformat or spend hours of your life cleaning a Mac or Linux machine because of malware? I'm not ignorant enough to think the gilded age of Mac and Linux being virtually malware free will last forever, but hey, enjoy it while it lasts.<p>8) <a href="http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/compare" rel="nofollow">http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/compare</a> Which one is right for you? Fuck you! It's a desktop or a server. The consumer should have one choice, appropriately priced that lets them do everything they can.<p>9) The ridiculous price of MS Office Suite.<p>10) Webforms, VIEWSTATE. Seriously, fuck you VIEWSTATE, whoever designed this dumb ass approach should have their computing license revoked.

Generally I think programmers hate Microsoft because programmers hate Microsoft. It's a self-perpetuating meme, and let's be honest, if your goal is to hate Microsoft (or any extremely large corporation) it's pretty easy to come up with reasons. Especially IE6, which is the Exxon Valdez of the programming world.

Because I lived through the 90s and early 2000s

I suspect that it's related to history, because there is a reason that the term "Microserf" exists. Microsoft used to operate like amazon does today -- burn the developers out and who gives a <i>$#</i> about turnout, because EVERYONE wants to work here...<p>... which was true, but it was for the money; Microsoft stock options were making people rich.<p>The proof?<p>The year that MS stock values dropped for the first time, MS started having trouble hiring people.<p>They treat their own developers a LOT better than they used to, in fact almost as well as Google does.<p>But it's hard to live that Microserf thing down... partly because that sweatshop method, replacing process with extra hours, leads to terrible, bug-ridden code.<p>What irks me more than people irrationally disliking Microsoft is people who spout about how bad Microsoft's code is, and how asinine their processes are, while making exactly the same mistakes that even Microsoft learned from and has been fixing.

If you want an eye-opening education, go read Mini-Microsoft (including the comments). Some groups are better than others but...<p>The performance review system causes corporate politics and backstabbing that beggar the imagination. MS has Darwinian competitions of very similar products that result in massive waste (see Kin that should have rolled in to Windows Phone). They do not manage dependencies well, leading to excruciating effort just to check in code. And they are basically headless.

Because the only programmers who post on the various forums are all web programmers.

Because they spit into everyone's well all the time. e.g.<p>- OOXML and the related perversion of the ISO process<p>- Wilful violation of standards (web, others)<p>- Hurting users for hollywood (Protected media path etc.)<p>- Broken security (by design) that has enabled all the botnets and spam you could ever think of, and then some.

My main beefs with MS<p>1) Bloating Office products with each successive release and discontinuing the old menu structure. I finally did something about this and switched from Outlook to Thunderbird.<p>2) MS has alienated small and independent developers by making Visual Studio in a bewildering number of versions and charging too much for it. They're completely focused on enterprise computing, but the enterprise has been off-shoring development for the last 15 years, so bright young developers have no interest in MS technology.

Programmers don't hate Microsoft.<p>Many hackers do. (No, not that kind of hacker. Those guys love Microsoft: plenty of vulnerabilities to exploit!)<p>But programmers, in general? They love Microsoft. Microsoft keeps food on their tables by providing Visual Basic, C#, and other tools that they can use to shovel out PoS or ERP code or whatever.<p>Most of the fun and innovation is in the realm of the hacker elite, though, to whom a Microsoft monoculture is both stifling and suffering from a chronic case of doing-it-wrong.

I hate a lot of the tools/libraries/frameworks/software I am forced to use on a daily basis, because a lot of it is complete crap, or has some very annoying misfeature that I run into constantly and there is no way around.<p>I'd wager that this is part of the reason many people hate Microsoft. They are or were forced to use windows at work, programming apps for windows using Microsoft tools or languages, etc. And many of them probably found it a pain in the butt.

I hated Microsoft because their OS would always crash, but now I don't mind them since the MS Dev job market is so good.

it's actually a very small vocal minority who hates microsoft. They hate microsoft because microsoft means ubiquitous standardized flatten programming environments the way managers like, with sheeple programmers properly strapped and assembling programs from paid frameworks.

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