Comment by npteljes
9 hours ago
Microsoft was never not a full-blown evil corporation. What they had, at their peak, is some software that worked well. In the background, same evil corporation as ever.
I can't even write a top example why. Just take a glance at the documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
There was a time when it looked like they were less "evil". There was a period punctuated by less anticompetitive behavior, embracing open source, no significant user-hostile moves, etc. and naively it did look like they are focused on the product not on abusing competitors or users. Can't say if this was a step in a carefully crafted plan, or just made business sense to be like this at the time. But Microsoft did look less evil for a brief time.
That sounds consistent with their classic embrace-extend-extinguish process [1]. Embracing with no significant user-hostile moves is step 1, and then abusing competitors and users comes as step 3 of the process. They need to briefly look less evil in step 1 to maneuver into position for step 3.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Looks-wise, I agree, the "MS heart Linux" era was better than the current one.
They haven't discovered side loading.