I consider myself to be a person of integrity, and I actively support Microsoft. I wonder how much you actually know about Microsoft as a company. I wonder how much you know it its history, internal debates, strategies, and so forth.
Here's the dilema. Microsoft engaged in legal business practices. Microsoft was found to be a monopoly. Retroactively, Microsoft's legal business practices became illegal because Microsoft was found to be a monopoly. It is my opinion, that the anti trust laws in the United States are foolish and contradictory. That is a debate for another time though.
I can fully support a company that at the time they were implementing particular strategies were doing so in full view of the law (how many lawyers look at EULAS?) and were doing so legally. Has Microsoft changed its business practices since the anti trust case? Yes!
Microsoft is a company that does a lot to support developers. They have perhaps the best site (MSDN) for developers that exists in the industry. They put on web casts, web seminars, trade shows, free developer conferences, large fee based developer conferences. They offer developer pricing for all of their products. They expose many API's and provide documentation for those API's via SDK's for nearly all of their products. They provide thousands of moderated newsgroups.
Microsoft, in my opinion, recognized and continues to recognize that it must treat its developers well, so that they will continue to build on its platforms. As a developer on Microsoft's platforms, I can say that its competition - Netscape, Oracle, Sun, Corel, IBM, Novell - have yet to offer me as much as Microsoft has. Microsoft makes my life easier, which enables me to make my clients lives easier.
I'll step off my soap box now.
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