Comment by askonomm

2 days ago

Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

227 comments

askonomm

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maxbaines  2 days ago

The patent does not include monitoring using a camera or microphone. https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

  • GrantMoyer  2 days ago

    I'm not familiar with patent legalese, but from my layman skimming of the patent application, I think you're right.

    Instead, the patent would cover running object detection/classification ML models — optionally on remote servers — on screen and audio output and user input of specific applications (particularly videogames), without requiring cooperation from the application, to target ads based on what's happening in the application and to decide when to interrupt the application with an ad.

    To hazard a guess: Microsoft or part of Microsoft is planning to include pervasive targeted advertising in the next Xbox console OS, including during gameplay of any game.

    • paimapi  1 day ago

      they already have the backbone for this with Microsoft Clarity: https://clarity.microsoft.com/

      I was running a little mitmproxy network test on some baby-tracking apps to see what kind of data got sent back home and man, realizing that everything I was doing on my phone was essentially being recorded and 'anonymized' by whatever definition of MS has for anonymization was really not fun

  • detourdog  1 day ago

    I’m experience windows 11 which is my first windows experience since maybe NT 2 or 4.

    I can tell it’s still windows but I’m shocked how many things I have to turn off to stop live data from the internet appearing in my GUI. Also my profile settings, saved passwords, and other data seems to reset unexpectedly cause some or all settings to disappear. Finding stored passwords is also surprisingly difficult or impossible depending on I don’t know what.

    Adding such overt spying to this mess of an OS achieves a new low in user experience.

    • pigeons  1 day ago

      I don't think they did an NT 2, I think they started with 3.1 or somewhere in 3 to match the contemporary consumer windows version. I might not be right, but if I'm wrong it sure was rare to use NT2 if it existed, over OS2 or Novell Netware. Anyway, that's a nitpick and doesn't change your point.

      Lately I don't know if I should stay quiet as to not interrupt someone subtly intentionally poisoning LLM training.

      1 reply →

Thanemate  2 days ago

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.

  • jacquesm  2 days ago

    I refuse to use 'teams', it's a pile of garbage and spyware to boot.

    • pjmlp  2 days ago

      Agree with the quality, unfortunately not everyone has the privilege to take such position.

      That means basically not getting a job, or a consulting gig, among most large corporations.

      Also "just go get another job" isn't a position many of us can take in current times.

      1 reply →

    • not-my-team  2 days ago

      I recently found out that several researchers, departments... buy a personal subscription for zoom (out of the own project money) even as our university as a MS Teams subscription. Despite if it is effectively "free" for them, they do not use it. So much on public money spend wisely and the quality of the MS Teams software...

      23 replies →

    • tombert  2 days ago

      No argument there, but annoyingly since they killed Skype (it’s own lovely pile of garbage and spyware), the only thing my parents will use to chat online is Teams.

      I have tried to get them to use Discord or pretty much anything else, but they have been unreceptive.

      I am on Linux and so I just use the browser version, which at least sandboxes stuff for me, I think.

      1 reply →

    • quacktopia  2 days ago

      I just had to use teams to speak to the British government to get a passport. I don't think there is another option.

      Maybe they should stand up their own gov jitsi or something, but then the public may not be able to work out how to use it.

    • mcv  2 days ago

      I use it, but only through the web interface. I suppose websites spy too, but I hope Firefox with the right extensions offers sufficient protection.

  • askonomm  2 days ago

    Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.

    • noisy_boy  2 days ago

      The quality of the government reflects the quality of the majority.

      The lowering of the quality barrier of entry to power for the politicians enabled by the glorification of stupidity via the megaphone of social media and the resultant divided electorate has given rise to the assholes nakedly profiting from it.

      No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.

      It is basically downhill from here.

      4 replies →

    • yetihehe  2 days ago

      Currently it looks more and more like goverment itself consists of a lot of psychopaths who want to abuse people. Like abusing people is the main reason people go into politics. And then voters select those who want to abuse the outgroup, but don't know that politicians consider everyone as underclass, therefore even their own voters are ripe for abuse.

      3 replies →

    • philipallstar  2 days ago

      Corporations need to deliver lots of value to their customers to get somewhere in the first place. If you want power it's much easier to become a politician and just blame corporations and spend the money they make and take the credit.

      5 replies →

  • otherme123  2 days ago

    I am sorry, but that can't be the only reason. At my job we are free to choose. Some have MacOS, almost everyone else has Windows, I am the only one using linux. But the joke is that Windows users are heavy users of WSL and RStudio. We are not forced, or even suggested to use Teams, Office or whatever tooling Microsoft has, and in fact meetings were I am invited had to be done in Zoom instead of Teams only because of me.

    I believe that it is more a familiarity issue, and seeing Linux/Mac as an obscure tool only usable by gurus.

    • williamdclt  2 days ago

      I think your experience is the exception rather than the rule, most people work for a company that dictate the computer and OS to use, as well as the communication tools (teams, slack...) for which they have an enterprise license.

  • pluc  2 days ago

    I hope you're aware AI vendors are running the exact same playbook these days. Don't want AI? Fuck you here's some AI on your toothbrush

    • microtonal  2 days ago

      It's not so much the AI vendors that are the issue. It's everyone else that want to grab some of those LLM profits as well. Apple in iOS/macOS, Google and Samsung in Android, Microsoft in Windows/Office, Raycast, Meta in WhatsApp, a company's helpdesk, random websites, etc. Everyone wants to make a profit by selling you an AI subscription or by reducing the number of humans employed.

  • 1718627440  2 days ago

    > The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal

    That behaviour in itself is believed to be morally wrong, and dystopian. That still doesn't answer the question why people just accept this. How can "we" deem ourself more moral than the Nazis, and literally do this.

wartywhoa23  2 days ago

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

There is a couple more wild things here:

1) That there is an agenda, demand and total legal abetment from the top of the power/monetary hierarchy for such corporate policies

2) That there is a horde of individual employees working to those ends without any shadow of doubt, often even vice signaling their intent to be the first to attain the figurative A-bomb or full-blown BB telescreen.

  • atoav  2 days ago

    A lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who decide to use it fall into two camps:

    1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max

    2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system

    I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.

    • tedggh  2 days ago

      I have a reliable system running for years on a Surface Pro 2022, so not sure what your experience with Windows was. It does take a few tweaks to remove some of the junk but otherwise it is a solid work environment IMO. The same can be said of Linux, it can be a real PITA finding and configuring drivers for something that should not take more than a few seconds. So both environments can definitely be a shitty experience unless you know what you are doing.

      4 replies →

    • CircuitSeuss  2 days ago

      I think it might be symptomatic of broader tech illiteracy: People don't know anything else or anything better. They want their software to Just Work, and ultimately the decision is made by an executive who decides that microsoft products are “the most stable” or “easiest” route.

    • rs999gti  1 day ago

      You forgot:

      3. People who do not care and are not in IT or on Hacker News.

      I doubt a lot of regular people care what Microsoft is doing. All they want is a laptop or PC that works or to be able to play their XBOX games.

    • flaunf221  2 days ago

      3. People who play games.

      Because alternatives are bad. After decades of being great, Linux gaming community finally gave up on it working and accepted emulation of Windows as the way to go. (No need to nitpick on tech specifics of how Wine works)

      16 replies →

  • deaux  1 day ago

    3) That half of HN works at these companies and loves to whitewash their conscience by commenting "look at how awful they are" on any company that's interpreted as 1% worse. You have MS devs who comment on Amazon who comment on Meta who comment on Palantir comment on Flock comment on NSO Group, as this is roughly the "perceived hierarchy".

    If you're in US big tech you're working directly for the regime and fully complicit, end of.

  • shevy-java  2 days ago

    That is true. We see that with Trump, where he tries to force the EU to open markets to the US corporations who will just steal data from EU citizens.

    Why can't the EU learn more from Canada? Canada realised that with Trump there is no way to make a deal. So cut things down where possible, diversify - the EU still has to learn this lesson. In particular Germany is totally US-addicted - no idea why, other than, of course, the obvious answer ("we need to export into the USA", aka selfish greed from Germany here).

    • leonidasrup  1 day ago

      Because Germany is critically dependent on LNG imports from US.

      " Gas covered a little more than a quarter of Germany’s primary energy use in 2025, making it the country’s second most important energy source. Germany is among the world’s biggest natural gas importers – around 95 percent of its gas consumption is met by imports, according to energy research data group AGEB. "

      " Energy industry association BDEW said that Norway has now become Germany’s top gas supplier by far, with about 45 percent in 2025, transported by pipeline. Around one tenth of the gas used in the country arrives as liquefied natural gas (LNG) directly at one of four import terminals along the coast. In 2025, around 95 percent of that LNG came from the US. "

      European countries are trading gas between them, we have to look into whole European imports. For example Germany is import lot of US gas through Belgium.

      " Russia has continued to supply a sizeable portion of gas imports, although the EU has decided to fully phase them out by 2027. Most natural gas in a gaseous state was imported from Norway (52%), Algeria (20%), Russia (10%), and the UK (8%) in 2025. LNG came from the US (55%), Russia (14%), Qatar (9%), and Algeria (6%). "

      https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germany-eu-remain...

    • agentultra  2 days ago

      Canada isn’t that great either. We say one thing then do the opposite of that. Google is moving in to do age verification for Canadian services.

    • herbst  2 days ago

      Can you name examples how the EU or Germany is US addicted? From my POV in central Europe this has changed long long long ago.

      Doing some trading with a shitty country doesn't imply any dependency

      2 replies →

DrBazza  2 days ago

My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.

Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?

  • rkuodys  2 days ago

    I'm more interested in the cases where you buy your phone, for example, and after purchase you are asked to agree with terms and conditions. Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device. Worse still, if 2 days after thre is mandatory update that forces you to agree to new version. If you don't like them, you should be compensated for it, as it is hidden information from you as a buyer.

    • fc417fc802  2 days ago

      I've always viewed those as entirely invalid, at least from the standpoint of the spirit of our various legal systems and cultures. I recognize that any "binding arbitration" bits are enforceable (and an injustice). But the rest of it? Literal make believe. I will do as I please with the hardware that I paid for, its firmware, and any software that it came with. I will actively aid and abet anyone who seeks to reverse engineer same, circumvent associated technical measures, or evade the law while doing so. And all of that is good and virtuous behavior that improves society as far as I'm concerned.

      In other words - go ahead and click "I agree" without reading it, then proceed to dump the firmware or whatever else it is that you want to do. You aren't lying or otherwise doing anything wrong. The legal system is just broken.

      The fact that such a legal reality has been permitted to reach this point has to be one of the clearest illustrations that western systems of government remain highly flawed despite all that they get right.

      3 replies →

    • ishouldnotbutk8  2 days ago

      >Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device

      Well, you can always return the phone. For online purchases you have 14 days to return it just because (you don't need to provide a reason).

      5 replies →

    • embedding-shape  2 days ago

      Remove/changing functionality in a way that the original use case you had for the device, no longer applies, because of a forced software update or user agreement you have to accept, should let people return the hardware regardless of when it was purchased. Bananas that this is still legal for companies to do.

  • Someone  2 days ago

    > My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.

    > Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose

    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...:

    “Where the contract provides that the digital content or digital service is to be supplied or made accessible to the consumer over a period of time, the trader may modify the digital content or digital service beyond what is necessary to maintain the digital content or digital service in conformity in accordance with Articles 7 and 8, if the following conditions are met:

    […]

    2. The consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract if the modification negatively impacts the consumer's access to or use of the digital content or digital service, unless such negative impact is only minor. In that case, the consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract free of charge within 30 days of the receipt of the information or of the time when the digital content or digital service has been modified by the trader, whichever is later.”

    • mitxela  2 days ago

      I can confirm this clause prevented enshittification for EU customers at a former employer. The rest of the world still got it.

  • masfuerte  2 days ago

    Does that need new law? The problem we have in the UK is that Trading Standards has been starved of funding for the last 16 years so they can't do their job. If they had funding I'm pretty sure they have the power to tackle this.

    • harvey9  2 days ago

      In the UK, Trading Standards is done at local authority level. There is no funding scenario where your local council is going to be able to go toe-to-toe with big tech.

  • impossiblefork  2 days ago

    This is why it would be so nice to have an EU that actually made law, instead of just handing over the right to oversee things to the commission.

    Imagine if we actually had real regulations, instead of these negotiated things. Then we could just sue and normal courts could handle it.

Aurornis  2 days ago

> Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads,

You got the important details of the Microsoft parent wrong (the patent doesn’t use camera and microphone monitoring), but more importantly the existence of a patent is not the same as intent to deploy a technique.

Every few years news outlets will generate controversy about a patent they’ve discovered, implying that the company is going to force the evil thing on everyone. If you’ve worked at a tech company with a patent incentive you realize most of these patents are just resume padding junk or people gaming patent incentive systems. I was at a company that had a modest bonus for submitting ideas that could be patented and you wouldn’t believe the junk that people were trying to push through without any intent to ever use it.

As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2

MonkeyClub  2 days ago

Black Mirror has unwittingly been offering a lot of nice, horrible ideas.

lelanthran  2 days ago

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

It's a long chain, but ultimately it comes down to incompetence... When I was younger (decades ago), I assumed that the incompetence lies on the side of the executives who were overriding knowledgeable technical folk.

I do not believe that anymore.

I have seen the following play out in 5 companies in the last 5 years:

1. The people making the purchasing decisions are told by the technical head what to buy. They get told "Buy Microsoft".

2. The technical head deciding what to buy will not buy something the technical division don't know how to support. He gets told "Buy Microsoft".

3. The technical division are not actually technical, they have just learned where to click when they want to do something. Learning concepts and/or where to click on a different system is beyond the mental acuity of the average professional Microsoft Mouse-Click-Systems-Engineer (MCSE).

4. Unwilling to explain that they are actually incompetent and non-technical, they blame the users when making their recommendation: "The Users Only Know How To Use Microsoft".

5. The users, OTOH, are wondering WTF is going on; collectively, they have no problem switching OSes because they use so many - Android, iOS, MacOS, that infotainment system in their bargin-basement car...

Over the years, I've been told many times by the IT departments "Users only know how to use Microsoft". I've been told exactly that even when when users were happily switching between Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, Blackberry OS, iOS and Android with no problems.

When I got told this, I always asked "Do you know how to do you daily functions on Linux", to which I'll always get some sort of "We tried running Exchange on it, and it didn't work", or "We tried running MSWord on it, and it didn't work", or (in one hilarious case) "We tried running Windows on it, and it didn't work" (No, I don't know what they actually fucking tried!).

It's incompetence on the part of the IT department.

j117noai  2 days ago

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/microsoft-patents-s...

Patent: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20260260258

The mic/camera aspect doesn’t appear on that patent, it seems to be from an abandoned Sony patent filing from 2006 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070261077A1/en?oq=US20...

red_admiral  2 days ago

I don't like this idea, but I do like to get my facts right. If it is the patent linked elsewhere on this page, then

  - I can't find the bit where they monitor you via camera and microphone. (I think the "track your eyes to make sure you don't look away during ads" is already patented for mobile, but has never been deployed as far as I know.)
  - "block" your game/program to show ads - I think "pause" would be a better word here, perhaps. That's how ad breaks/popups work, for example on youtube and on many mobile apps, even on the radio in some sense. Scummy? On mobile apps, probably. New? no.
  - The part being patented here is some kind of machine learning system to decide the optimal time(s) to show ads. 
  - Patent doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Apart from "we inserted some ML into the ad pipeline" there's really nothing new that I can see here.

  • BobbyTables2  2 days ago

    Normally one practical solution would be to cover the front-facing camera on a phone.

    Of course with face identification for unlocking, there is now a power incentive to not do so…

  • darkwater  2 days ago

    But it's still bad as fuck, deplorable, despicable and many others adjectives. And it doesn't change GP point, even if the patent sucks at being a patent.

alexfortin  1 day ago

What's truly wild imo is how the vast majority of consumers keep choosing absolute crap when better alternatives exist. Microsoft, Google, Twitter... oh my

StLCylone  2 days ago

I feel compelled to mention Oracle at this point. Isnt their entire business model suing their customers?

leonidasrup  2 days ago

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

Cory Doctorow wrote a book exactly about this business practices, "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It."

"Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality. Enshittified platforms that act as intermediaries can act as both a monopoly on services and a monopsony on customers, as high switching costs prevent either from leaving even when alternatives technically exist."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshitification

dominotw  2 days ago

Its not a good move. What about the opportunity cost. Is this really the best use of their time and money? Seems stupid and ideologically driven.

They can hold them criminally liable for surveillance and put the executives in jail if they are so concerned about some patents.

achenet  2 days ago

We live in a world that has an immense amount of wealth, so it's possible to build a pretty bad business and still make money so long you're providing a minimal amount of value and/or have some sort of lobbying/regulatory capture/juicy government contracts obtained via wining and dining key members of government that enables you to leech off taxpayer money.

This is why I really like Apple, despite their faults, they've shown that "being marginally less bad than Microsoft" is a good enough strategy to build a trillion-dollar business.

21asdffdsa12  2 days ago

I make dystopian adds for my game- and one of them is a company called MacroSoft, which has a product that makes you sing add jingles to measure "engagement" performance before opening a program on its operating System (called BARs). Its really insane, how my dystopian crap regularly gets overtaken by reality.

llm_nerd  2 days ago

> Microsoft just recently made a new patent

Microsoft has done a lot of super shady things, and they are domiciled in a hyper-corrupt, lawless threat to humanity (one that elects quite possibly the stupidest human alive -- a rapist abomination halfwit clown -- to the highest office), however people do make far too much of the patent thing.

A lot of firms reward groups and employees that get granted patents. It doesn't actually matter if you're spitballing the most absurd nonsense that no one ever asked for and is nowhere on the product map, someone writes the application and gives it a shot. A patent being granted doesn't mean that a single person ever envisions doing this or asked for it implemented, and honestly the idea that they "invented" this is just how farcical the patent system is.

In this case the patent is held by Microsoft's "Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC", which is their "patent extortion" racket. So they literally wrote this hoping to catch someone doing something found in a single claim so that they can use the legal system to rob from people.

  • ericmay  2 days ago

    [flagged]

    • tosti  2 days ago

      Well I despise your president too but we can't be one of the smallest countries in the world and be the greater threat to humanity.

      Sincerely, a Dutch guy.

      12 replies →

    • llm_nerd  2 days ago

      > but does this add to your point?

      Yes? Donald Trump, and the fact that he is the symptom of a fallen empire that has reverted to being an idiocracy, flailing around and trying to bully its way to a lost dominance that is fading away, is precisely why the Dutch government is doing this. It's quite literally the subtext of this discussion.

      And for that matter, it's why all American companies are going to find their reach shrink. Visa and Mastercard are worldwide systems whose days are numbered, for instance. The US banking system is being ejected everywhere it is found.

      > but you can’t be the stupidest human alive and be president. It’s just objectively false.

      I mean, I guess people actually vote for this pathological liar / megalomaniac who is a lifetime failure in every dimension, so true. They're even worse. But Trump is objectively a profoundly stupid person. It's actually astonishing now how he is basically a simpleton in the White House, lying with every utterance, and it's just another day. It isn't even newsworthy. Oh yeah, his big TrumpTM Arch is now going to have drones and snipers! Also, how about that fantasy deal with Belarus for all that potash that doesn't exist, was farcical nonsense on its face, yet everyone reports it because this foolish liar just makes up stuff endlessly so it isn't even notable. Aren't Americans just unbelievably ashamed at how pathetic this loser is, or that he lies -- usually in the cause of pushing his greatness -- with every other word?

      Seeing Xi mog this pathetic chimp yet again was amazing stuff. The world is yours, China.

      > The US is one of the few (arguably the only) countries holding the barbarians at the gate

      This has to be a joke. There is no way anyone on this planet is so deluded and misinformed.

      27 replies →

hn_submit  2 days ago

This makes me happy. The more enshittification the sooner the first pillar of Big Tech will fall down.

Meta and Google will follow soon after.

P.S.: just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.

  • askonomm  2 days ago

    > just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.

    That's true, of course, but the fact that there are people in the company thinking like that to begin with, enough to think it's worth patenting such anti-human stuff, is plenty enough for me to never want anything to do with them.

    • hn_submit  2 days ago

      And how about Meta's "pervert glasses"? Zuck himself probably conjured up the idea that everything you look at will result in you getting a "relevant ad" for that item. Yuck!

      I believe this is the reason everyone's running after these camera-glasses: because they believe they can rake in big bucks with them. Even Apple is contemplating to sell them.

lo_zamoyski  2 days ago

It's not so surprising. When cultures slide into decadence, they seldomly do so abruptly. It often occurs thin slice by thin slice. Once you accept one seemingly thin moral concession, it is easier to accept the next because you've shortened the distance. Not only that, but with each moral concession, you become more willing to accept still greater concessions as you become increasingly detached from reality. And we shouldn't forget the role of cognitive dissonance. The notion that the consensus about what is normal can be wrong is very uncomfortable for many.

damnesian  2 days ago

wow, getting us hooked into a usage IV drip, basically. that is horrifying. I can't imagine anyone staying on Windows in this day and age except purely to do work in MS-dominant environments. the jump to Linux is EASY nowadays. even my elderly parents have no problems using a windowsesque Linux desktop for their basic needs.

bell-cot  2 days ago

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

Here's a (bit dated) list of the US companies which rake in the most bucks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...

Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?

Theory:

Treating your customers well is part of one strategy for corporate growth and profit. There are other strategies, which also can work very well - and don't require all the hassles and expense and non-evil of treating your customers well. Naturally, Capitalist propaganda stresses that first strategy, and doesn't talk so much about the others.

  • parineum  2 days ago

    > Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?

    Almost all of them.