Paul Jacobson

We all know the tale of the Evil Microsoft who conquered the land and made almost all the friendly inhabitants slaves to its evil and corrupt software.  This is a story I have relayed (in typical broken telephone fashion) many times and have lately begun to re-examine.  For an interesting perspective, here is a post by a Mac user titled "What Makes Microsoft so 'Evil'?".  The author, Chelion, looks at a few Microsoft products including DRM, IE7 and Longhorn.  It is a very Scoble-like analysis (pretty fair-minded, I think) and part of his conclusion was the following:

While I appreciate Microsoft’s amazing efforts in creating and maintaining a long list of products, and the good they do in the world. I still wonder why $9 billion is spent on R&D that does not make itself apparent (Apple spends less, and you can see what they come up with). They do an amazing job at making products expandable (at the expense of conformity or a finished feature set), but I can’t get over the nagging defect I come across in every Microsoft product I use.

(via Scoble)