If you have reason to hate I am sorry for you. While your site lists some generally known facts which are neither reason to love nor hate Microsoft there is also a huge number of statements without proper backup or sources. You are complaining about missing backwards compatibility, where you refer to changed APIs between XP and 2000 and state many applications wouldnt work anymore. Why dont you provide sources? Why dont you name these many applications which shouldnt work anymore? Why do you think were Ex versions of functions provided to offer additional functionality? You complain about missing compatibility between .NET 1.0 and 1.1 and provide only an invalid link (J2SE 1.0 and 1.1 were not compatible too by the way). You complain about Microsoft because of the number of supported file systems and processors. While a wider range in these terms is not negative, one can hardly use it to show how "bad" a company is. You are referring to "hidden" APIs. I'd like to know how such one would look like. There are a couple of undocumented functions, but this is a common issue (especially in such large APIs, also to preserve backwards compatibility, which you just complained about) and nothing special. But you chose to use it as argument to prove once again how bad a company is.
I have sources for just about everything. Anything else is from my own experiences in the industry. I am therefore the source for the rest. You don't think all of the lies, illegal practices, low quality products, and other facts are reason to dislike Microsoft? For 10 years I created custom applications to run on Windows. The many applications which broke with XP were my own and my company's. Most software in existence is not on store shelves. Most are custom corporate apps. And a huge percent broke between OS versions due to API changes. My source is myself, my employers, and other professionals I've talked to, so obviously none of the applications I'd list would have any significance for you. The link may be old. I'll update it. The facts are still valid and the original source was Microsoft. And I'm not saying Java or anyone else is better. Just that it broke. And broke significantly. If they had built a solid platform of APIs then it could have been backwards compatible. Not everything on the site is about how bad Microsoft is. In that particular case it's about how inadequate their products are. Microsoft stated in US federal court, in EU documents, and at other times that the APIs available to developers are all completely documented. This is obviously false as people have found functionality which exists without any reference in documentation. Some exist so their own products can behave in ways which are unavailable to the competition. What's bad is they claim to be open and honest when they are clearly not. Using hidden APIs to benefit their own applications over the competition is illegal (when running on Windows) due to their legal monopoly.
Then you should name them. In this case you should present your experiences in detail. I cant see lies, illegal practices, low quality products and other facts. Microsoft is definitely not a saint, but a corporation with the aim to make as many money as possible. Just like each company, IBM, Sun, Google, Red Hat and thats just the IT sector. Welcome to capitalism. XP is an operating system targetting solely the end customer and workstation market, hence it is the direct successor of ME and 2000. 2000 and XP are based on the same kernel, hence compatibility issues were minimal. Most of them occured during the upgrade path from ME and happened mostly because the application was only developed towards an 9x environment without user permissions and NT specific features as well as applications which communicated directly with the hardware. So if your applications crashed because of these reasons you shouldnt blame Microsoft but rather yourself. Again, please provide examples. Your statement is read as in mainstream applications. If you were referring to some custom applications you should have mentioned that. Anyhow even if the name of such an application might have not significance for me you can provide here at least some examples of the problems you encountered. If you were really 10 years in this business you would know that it is often impossible to create an application (and even less a framework like .NET) and take every possible future feature into account. Some times you just have to drop certain parts of compatibility. It was exactly compatibility why Windows 95 had these issues it had, at which people complained at. Seems you can never satisfy everyone. Anyhow, apparently you consider Java as non-solid platform too. You consider Windows (or from your statement, right all products) inadequate simply because its processor support is/was limited to 4 and it supports out-of-the-box only its own two file systems? You seem to have very particular requirements. Would you also call vBulletin inadequate because it does not support popular databases like PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Firebird and not even Oracle? And that is correct. All APIs available to developers are completely and officially documented. Should you be referring to undocument functions, well these are undocumented because they are not available to the developers. Microsoft's developer documentation is one of the most complete and detailed available. Such functionality always exists in every product, especially with APIs. Name an example. A monopoly with dozens of competitor products? Having undocumented - again, not hidden - functionality (a typical issue in this business) being illegal? Please get your facts straight.