This is the place "the water cooler" to state opinions right?
The topic was "employees say micrsoft is great", my opinion who cares?
I don't take a competitors word for gold. If you have a company, (say MS) who makes false claims about their competition (remeber fake errors about DR DOS?) Then their claims don't hold a lot of water. When you see multiple companies in mulitple different feilds accusing and even suing MS over their unethical business practices you can see a better consenus of what that company is really like.
My original point, though maybe poorly stated, was that weither its Hitler, or Rockerfeller, when you have power the people under you are going to be on your side, its called toadying. Just becuase the employees are too worried, or too afraid of loosing their gravy train, or both, they aren't going to bad mouth MS. I think you are all jumping to conclusions that I am comparing Gates to Hitler, some simliarities maybe, but I would not pretend to say they were the same. Some of the social manipulation tactics are very simlar though, as are some of the procedures internally.
When MS introduces false evidence in a US court and gets away with being Caught in the act and not punished, something is wrong. You should not be able to drive your competition out of busine by any means other than offering a better product, and MS goes further than trying to do just that.
I think that money is not everything is exactly what I am saying. MS employees, wether due to vaction time, money etc, it all boils down to compensation. They are happy with MS because they feel well compensated. That doesn't say a thing to me about wether its really a good company to work for. I care too much about the social impact to society to work for a company that I feel has business practices that are detremental to fair and open competition that made our country great.
Not to mention for a company that is so great to work for, they sure have a lot of turnover in upper management.
Just because they plough money back to the people who help them make it doesn't make it great to work for.
And I do question the judgement of MS employees, I understand that the majority of them are probably hard working decent people. However MS's actions have been pretty well publicized, and anyone in the know in the tech community ought to have some idea they behave badly.
I think that any business could act heavyhanded like MS and try to kill off competition, usually the SEC would step in, but the DOJ and SEC are currently turning a very blind eye to thier behavior. Someone who works for MS in my opinion is either uneducated about their business practices, or is more interesed in getting their compensation regardless of the cost to others.
Come on people how much negative public opinion has to build up before we start seeing a problem? At one point if you typed "evil" into google, Microsoft was the #1 hit. Granted this is from some too rabid rhetoric, but it still shows a common view about their actions.
