I'm helping a friend of mine writing a long essay exposing the abusive, monopolistic and anti-consumer practices of Microsoft. First, we've created some sort of table of contents with the different topics we want to cover and now we're gathering sources for each of these topics.
Microsoft is a huge corporation with a big influence on media and although if you dig enough you can find useful sources, they've also made an extremely good job at hiding bad press from search engines.
We've scrolled through Hacker News, other links aggregators and sites like TechRights and we've found a good amount of articles against Microsoft. But we're sure there has to be more. So that's kinda why we're asking.
Bullet points for the sections we've thought of (suggestions are welcome too):
* The Microsoft Monopoly
* Microsoft and the web
* Internet Explorer
* Microsoft Edge
* Microsoft Windows Monopoly
* Microsoft and the Governments
* Education
* Healthcare
* Microsoft Gaming Empire
* Windows Backdoors (not sure where this section belongs)
* Work with the NSA
* Microsoft loves Open Source (microsoft infiltration in foss)
* Microsoft and the OSI
* Github
* Github Copilot
* VSCode
* War on GPL
* Microsoft loves Linux and BSD?
* Embrace, extend, extinguish
* Our lord, Bill Gates
* The media empire
* Twitter censorship
* Bill Gates the philanthropist
* Big Pharma
* Bill and Jeffrey Epstein
Edit: typos and removed the pun "Kill Bill Gates" because it seemed inappropriate.
The disaster that was Vista (increased system requirements, "vista capable" lawsuit)
Trusted computing controversy
Secure boot
Decision to remove the Start button in Windows 8
UWP apps - about how bloated they are
Replacement of lightweight win32 apps to bloated UWP (eg Sticky Notes, Notepad, Photo Gallery etc)
The new Settings applet and the deprecation of the old Control Panel
Complete removal of certain Control Panel applets, with no GUI replacements
Deep integration of Explorer.exe from Windows 8 onwards, making it near-impossible to have a complete shell replacement (affecting the third-party shells such as BlackBox)
Locking down of OS features in the name of "security" (eg requiring a hack to apply custom themes)
Aggressive nagging to upgrade to Windows 10 (including forced upgrades)
Windows Update: specifically, how it hijacks your PC
Windows Update can sometimes remove Linux as a bootable option
Lack of a rolling release model
Aggressive telemetry and user data collection
Increased bloatware and unwanted features
Ads in Start Men and File Explorer
Print Nightmare bug mismanagement
Bug that caused the deletion of user documents
Microsoft Pluton
Forcing new Windows users to sign in with a Microsoft Account, requiring a hack to use local accounts
The constant push towards Microsoft cloud services, which are not only a privacy nightmare but have hidden costs and is unreliable (eg frequent outages, lack of troubleshooting features, clunky)
Microsoft Intune sucks and isn't a replacement for SCCM, in spite of them claiming otherwise
Constant product renames (eg: SCCM > MECM, Azure AD > Entra ID etc)
Forcing driver apps to be distributed and updated via Microsoft Store
Microsoft Store
Artificial TPM and CPU requirements for Windows 11 (planned obsolescence)
Removal of useful features from Window 11 (eg: taskbar customisation options)
Wait... I'm only 3 years into it. Is SCCM the direct predecessor of AAD/EID? I follow the SCCM group on Reddit because they usually have good opinions on updates, but have never understood what the fuck they actually did.
No, AD is the predecessor of AAD. SCCM is the "predecessor" of Intune, or at least that's what some camps at Microsoft want you to think. Oh wait, I forgot that they also renamed MECM to MCM now.🤦