Criticism of Microsoft

Microsoft has been criticized for various aspects of its products and business practices. Issues with ease of use, robustness, and security of the company's software are common targets for critics. In the 2000s, a number of malware mishaps targeted security flaws in Windows and other products. Microsoft was also accused of locking vendors and consumers in to their products, and of not following or complying with existing standards in its software.[1][2] Total cost of ownership comparisons between Linux and Microsoft Windows are a continuous point of debate.[3]

The company has been the subject of numerous lawsuits, brought by several governments and by other companies, for unlawful monopolistic practices. It was the subject of the landmark 1998 United States v. Microsoft Corp. American antitrust law case, during which Microsoft CEO Bill Gates was called "evasive and unresponsive" and the company's officials were found on a number of occasions to have falsified evidence.[4][5] In 2004, the European Union found Microsoft guilty in the Microsoft Corp. v. Commission case, and it received an 899 million euro fine.[6]

Ties to US Government departments

On September 14, 2019, Microsoft's flagship store was shut down by protestors as part of a direct action organized by Close the Camps NYC. The action was in response to Microsoft's $19.4 million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).[7][8][9][10] Microsoft's relationship with the immigration enforcement agency was revealed by executive Tom Keane, through a company blog post that described ICE's use of the company's high-security cloud storage product Azure Government.[11] He went on to say the company is "proud to support" the work of ICE.[11]

In February 2019, some of Microsoft's employees protested the company's

Copyright enforcement

When Microsoft discovered that its first product, Altair BASIC, was subject to widespread unauthorized copying, Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists that openly accused many hobbyists of stealing software. Gates' letter provoked many responses, with some hobbyists objecting to the broad accusation, and others supporting the principle of compensation.[13] This disagreement over whether software should be proprietary continues into the present day under the banner of the free software movement, with Microsoft characterizing free software released under the terms of the GPL as being "potentially viral"[14] and the GNU General Public License itself as a "viral license" which "infects" proprietary software and forces its developer to have to release proprietary source to the public.[15]

The Halloween documents, internal Microsoft memos which were leaked to the open source community beginning in 1998, indicate that some Microsoft employees perceive "open source" software

Mono patent concerns

On July 6, 2009, Microsoft announced that it was placing their ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specifications under their Community Promise pledging that they would not assert their patents against anyone implementing, distributing, or using alternative implementations of .NET.[31] Mono's implementation of those components of the .NET stack not submitted to the ECMA for standardization has been the source of patent violation concerns for much of the life of the project.[32] In particular, discussion has taken place about whether Microsoft could destroy the Mono project through patent suits.[33]

The base technologies submitted to the ECMA, and therefore also the Unix/GNOME-specific parts, are claimed to be safe due to Microsoft's explicitly placing both ECMA 334 (C#) and ECMA 335 (CLI) standards under the Microsoft Community Promise. The concerns primarily relate to technologies developed by Microsoft on top of the .NET Framework, such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms (see non-standardized namespaces), i.e. parts composing Mono's Windows compatibility stack. These technologies are today not fully implemented in Mono and not required for developing Mono-applications, they are simply there for developers and users who need full compatibility with the Windows system.

Ignoring unauthorized copying

Microsoft ignored unauthorized copying of its own software for their benefit on the long term. While talking about users in China who do not pay for the software they use in 2006, to an audience at the University of Washington, Bill Gates said "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."[39]

The practice allowed Microsoft to gain some dominance over the Chinese market and only then taking measures against unauthorized copies. In 2008, by means of the Windows update mechanism, a verification program called "Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA) was downloaded and installed.[40] When WGA detects that the copy of Windows is not genuine, it periodically turns the user's screen black. This behavior angered users and generated complaints in China with a lawyer stating that "Microsoft uses its monopoly to bundle its updates with the validation programs and forces its users to verify the genuineness of their software".[41]

Licensing agreements

A common complaint[42] comes from those who want to purchase a computer that usually comes preinstalled with Windows without a copy of Windows pre-installed and without paying extra for the license either so that another operating system can be used or because a license was already acquired elsewhere, such as through the MSDN Academic Alliance program.[43] Microsoft encourages original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to supply computers with Windows pre-installed[44] by presenting their dominance in computer sales[45] and arguing that consumers benefit by not having to install an operating system. Because the price of the license varies depending on discounts given to the OEM and because there is no similar computer that the OEM offers without Windows, there is no immediate way to find the size of the refund. In 2009, Microsoft stated that it has always charged OEMs about $50 for a Windows license on a $1,000 computer.[46]

Litigation

Microsoft's market dominance and business practices have attracted widespread resentment, which is not necessarily restricted to the company's competitors. In a 2003 publication, Dan Geer argued the prevalence of Microsoft products has resulted in a monoculture which is dangerously easy for viruses to exploit.[61]

On June 25, 2024, the European Commission accused Microsoft of violating the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union by bundling Microsoft Teams with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Office.[62]

Labor practices

Microsoft has been criticized for the use of permatemp employees (employees employed for years as "temporary", and therefore without medical benefits), use of forced retention tactics, where departing employees would be sued to prevent departure, as well as more traditional cost-saving measures, ranging from cutting medical benefits to not providing towels in company locker rooms.[63]

Historically, Microsoft has also been accused of overworking employees, in many cases, leading to burnout within just a few years of joining the company. The company is often referred to as a "Velvet Sweatshop", a term which originated in a 1989 Seattle Times article,[64] and later became used to describe the company by some of Microsoft's own employees.[65] This characterization is derived from the perception that Microsoft provides nearly everything for its employees in a convenient place, but in turn overworks them to a point where it would be bad for their (possibly long-term) health. For example, the kitchenettes have free beverages and many buildings include exercise rooms and showers. However, the company has been accused of attempting to keep employees at the company for exceptionally long hours. This is detailed in several books about Microsoft, including Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire.

Advertising and public relations

Critics have alleged that Microsoft has used funding to drum up support from think tanks and trade organizations such as the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI), the Independent Institute, and Americans for Technology Leadership (ATL). During the antitrust case United States v. Microsoft, ATL sent a poll to 19 state attorneys general purporting to show that "the public believes state AGs should devote their energy to causes other than Microsoft".[71] Also during the case the Independent Institute ran full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Post defending Microsoft, which was later revealed to have funded the ad campaign.[72] The institute published Winners, Losers, and Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology shortly thereafter.[73]

In June 2002, the AdTI published a report, quickly pulled under the argument that it was a draft version, which contained criticism of the copyleft model and the GNU General Public License. A May 2002 press release for the report stated that it would contain arguments suggesting that governments could be threatened by hackers and terrorists (who could study potential vulnerabilities due to source availability) if it used

Tax avoidance

As reported by several news outlets,[101][102] an Irish subsidiary of Microsoft based in the Republic of Ireland declared £220 bn in profits but paid no corporation tax for the year 2020. This is due to the company being tax resident in Bermuda as mentioned in the accounts for 'Microsoft Round Island One', a subsidiary that collects licence fees from the use of Microsoft software worldwide. Dame Margaret Hodge, a Labour MP in the UK said, "It is unsurprising – yet still shocking – that massively wealthy global corporations openly, unashamedly and blatantly refuse to pay tax on the profits they make in the countries where they undertake business".[102]

In 2020, ProPublica reported that the company had diverted more than $39 billion in U.S. profits to Puerto Rico using a mechanism structured to make it seem as if the company was unprofitable on paper. As a result, the company paid a tax rate on those profits of "nearly 0%." When the Internal Revenue Service audited these transactions, ProPublica reported that Microsoft aggressively fought back, including successfully lobbying Congress to change the law to make it harder for the agency to conduct audits of large corporations.[103]

Blacklisting of journalists

John C. Dvorak said that in the 1980s, Microsoft classified journalists as "Okay", "Sketchy", or "Needs work" and targeted "Needs work" journalists in an attempt to have them terminated. Dvorak said that he was denied information about Windows because he was on a blacklist.[105] Mary Jo Foley stated that she was denied interviews with Microsoft personnel for several years following the publication of a story based on a memo describing the number of bugs in Windows 2000 at release.[106]

Censorship in China

Microsoft (along with Google, Yahoo, Cisco, AOL, Skype, and other companies) has cooperated with the Chinese government in implementing a system of Internet censorship.[107][108] Human rights advocates such as Human Rights Watch and media groups such as Reporters Without Borders criticized the companies, noting for example that it is "ironic that companies whose existence depends on freedom of information and expression have taken on the role of censor."[109] Since 2009, Microsoft has run a local version of Bing in China that censors thousands of websites and phrases such as "human rights" and "Communist Party corruption".[107]

Privacy issues

Robot journalism

In May 2020, Microsoft announced that a number of its MSN contract journalists would be replaced by robot journalism leading to criticism about which stories would be displayed and their quality.[140][141][142]

Xbox live controversies

ANS patent controversy

Asymmetric numeral systems is a widely used family of methods in data compression, whose author released it into public domain, wanting to be unrestricted by the patent system, and had stopped Google from patenting it.[152] In June 2019 Microsoft lodged a patent application called 'Features of range asymmetric number system encoding and decoding'.[153] The USPTO issued a final rejection of the application on October 27, 2020. Yet on March 2, 2021, Microsoft gave a USPTO explanatory filing stating "The Applicant respectfully disagrees with the rejections",[154] seeking to overturn the final rejection under the "After Final Consideration Pilot 2.0" program.[155] The application is currently still pending,[153] as USPTO has not confirmed if it will allow the rejection appeal to proceed. Microsoft won the patent in 2022.[156]

Forced Uyghur labor in Xinjiang

In 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute accused at least 82 major brands of being connected to forced Uyghur labor in Xinjiang. Microsoft is reported as being supplied by three Chinese factories employing Uyghur and Xinjiang workers.[157] In 2024, a Microsoft incubator was reported to have provided support to two Chinese companies that sell software used for censorship in China.[158]

Israeli military support

The Israeli military has utilized Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform and AI services during the Gaza war to identify targets. Since 2022, it has also used Microsoft's servers to store millions of hours of intercepted Palestinians' phone calls.[159] The Israeli Ministry of Defense is Microsoft's second largest military customer. This relationship has led to protests within the company.[160][161] In response, Microsoft employees founded the "No Azure for Apartheid" campaign to advocate for the company to cut ties with Israel.[162] The group is a part of the larger No Tech for Apartheid movement.[163]

Push for artificial intelligence features (Microslop)

See also

Criticism of other software companies:

General mechanisms at work:

• Criticism of Facebook
• Criticism of Apple Inc.
• Criticism of Google
• Criticism of Yahoo
• Criticism of Amazon
• Criticism of Spotify
• Criticism of Netflix
• Criticism of Dropbox

Further reading

• Charles, John. "Indecent proposal? Doing Business With Microsoft". IEEE Software. January/February 1998. pp.113–117.
• Clark, Jim with Owen Edwards. Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion Dollar Start-up That Took on Microsoft. New York, Saint Martin's Press, 1999
• Cusumano, Michael A.; Selby, Richard W. Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets and Manages People. New York: Free Press, 1995.
• Edstrom, Jennifer; Eller, Marlin. Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from inside: How the World's Richest Corporation Wields its Power . N.Y. Holt, 1998.
• Lemos, Robert. (2003). U.S. funds study of tech monocultures. Retrieved December 20, 2003, from https://web.archive.org/web/20110810000229/http://news.cnet.com/2100-7355-5111905.html
• Moody, Fred. I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier. New York: Viking, 1995.
• National Science Foundation. (2003). Taking Cues from Mother Nature to Foil Cyber Attacks. Retrieved December 20, 2003, from https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/03/pr03130.htm
• Groklaw portal on Microsoft litigation

External links

Discussions of Microsoft's business practices :

TCO :

Tax evasion :

User feedback :

• Microsoft's Sacred Cash Cow (Seattle Weekly)
• CNN.com – Microsoft: Flaw left millions at risk (Flaw Discovered by Faisal Danka)
• CNN.com -- FTC urges US appeals court to unwind Microsoft-Activision merger
• http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
• Dissecting Microsoft – Analyzes Microsoft's business practices and software
• "The Microsoft Tax"