Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians

The problem is that if you're very very bad, you can do a good thing and still be very bad.

What other reasons are Microsoft very very bad? Genuinely curious about what your definition of "very, very bad" is and whether it aligns with mine.

Search for "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".

So the criticisms from the 90s that I mentioned in my other comment? Yeah, I prefer to live in the modern world. It isn't Microsoft that needs to be hit with antitrusts in 2025. It's Apple and Google. Live moves on, and in 2025, Microsoft is one of the more ethical tech companies around, unless you're one of the many sheltered people in tech that think targeted advertising is manifest evil that's on par with enabling a genocide.

I'm 40. For me, the modern world didn't just start in 2019. And the list is additive. The fact that Microsoft has been on it since the 90s doesn't stop me from also listing Google, Apple, and Amazon.

Modern by definition means the modern day, I'm not sure what 2019 was but we don't get to redefine terms for our own use. The list is only "additive" if the criticisms still apply. Your presumably best example was a corporate strategy from the 90s. Companies, just like (most) people, change. 2025 Microsoft is pro-Linux and a much better force for good than most other tech companies, yet almost invariably I find the people triggered by the mention of Microsoft tend to be relatively quiet about and/or active consumers of Apple, Amazon, Google et al.

> What other reasons are Microsoft very very bad

Their laziness, greed and business acumen have left us in the position that the world's dominant personal OS is insecure, unreliable and running a protection racket with virus detection (and virus writers)

This is an ongoing rolling clusterfuck, and is entirely due to MS

I think you're selling this too far with "one of the more ethical tech companies around" and "a force for good". You'll have to clarify what exactly that comparison is based on.

I'm not a total fan of Apple here but it's weird to contrast them with Apple in this case when they don't enable a genocide (having a closed ecosystem is a UX decision compared to genocide). You mention that Microsoft is now "pro-Linux", but if that's your measure, many other tech companies contribute significantly more to the Linux kernel. https://lwn.net/Articles/1031161/

With respect to anti-trust, some of their bundling decisions absolutely deserve to be scrutinized (e.g. Teams).

Furthermore, Microsoft is still doing business with the IDF. If your bar is "enabling a genocide" (presumably by being in contract with the IDF), I don't think that's changed too much, just the most egregious example of cloud services in service of that are being challenged (Unit 8200 stuff). It looks like that work is now moving the AWS though.

You're right, I was operating on the assumption this was the last of their ties before I'd properly read the article and looked into the issue, unfortunately it looks like it's still on the boycott list until they actually divest from Israeli military at the least. Apple is therefore not as unethical as the genocide-enabling companies (and isn't one of them to the best of my knowledge), but it's still far more unethical than most people in tech tend to acknowledge - their pricing practices are akin to price-gouging, including 2-3x markup on like-for-like hardware and locking you into their own accessories before the EU forced them to standardise, and the whole "walled garden" ecosystem was never anything but an excuse to limit what consumers can do with their software/hardware. They almost single-handedly raised the prices of mobile phones for the vast majority of people because other manufacturers saw what their consumers were letting them get away with. And that's before we even get started on the sweatshops.

In other comments replying to another user you dismissed "criticisms from the 90s", but I think that's not entirely justified. If the bad things they did in the 90s are still having bad effects today, and they built their success on those bad things, then it's not really enough just to stop doing them; they would need to actively try to right those past wrongs.

However, even in the present, the increasing intrusiveness of their update schemes, forcing people to have a Microsoft account even to install Windows, shoving AI into people's faces at every opportunity, etc., would all count as reasons I think they are bad. Also I tend to think in general that simply existing as a giant corporation with large market share is bad.

To be clear, I also think that Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., are also very very bad. I think I'd agree that these days Microsoft is on the lower end of badness among these megacorps. However, that's partly just because it's become somewhat weaker than it was at the height of its badness. You could argue that this isn't "badness" but something like "ability to implement badness" but I see those as pretty closely tied. Basically the bigger a corporation becomes, the harder it has to work to avoid being bad.