Fallacy of relative privation (also known as "appeal
to worse problems" or "not as bad as") – dismissing
an argument or complaint due to what are perceived
to be more important problems. First World problems
are a subset of this fallacy.
Nestle is evil. Microsoft is evil. Nestle kills more than Microsoft. Microsoft is still evil.
My bar for evil is a lot higher than "signed exclusive distribution agreements with some OEMs in the 90s."
Illegal? Sure. Evil? So some other millionaires didn't get to become billionaires. Meanwhile the world got a single API to write software against for almost two decades, how many ISVs existed because Microsoft provided an insanely stable (in regards to API churn) platform to develop against?
Hell right now with 2 major mobile OS players there is a huge tax on developers, imagine if the 90s had been a wild west and there had been 4 or 5 major players.
One can also note that given how mobile played out, there is a good chance that the desktop market would have coalesced around a single dominant OS and a secondary minor OS anyway.
And yeah I know everyone is pissed about BeOS, but they also had their chance to be a player until they tried to hard bargain with Apple and Apple walked away!
While I agree with the general feelings about the evil threshold, Microsoft in the 90-ties built and took advantage of a natural monopoly in order to crush their competition and expand in new markets.
Let's not go to the other extreme and downplay what they did. If they had their way, the Internet wouldn't be an open platform and open source would be illegal.
Personally I don't care about exclusive OEM deals. What I care about were the dirty campaigns against open source and them trying to leverage their huge patents portfolio against Linux and later Android. Or them planting shills inside Nokia, weakening it enough for a takeover of their mobile division and then running it into the ground, thus destroying one of Europe's top tech companies. A conspiracy theorist would say that this was economic warfare, maybe sponsored by the US, but for me incompetence is enough for blame.
Or how about their long battle against open standards, like ODF and their use by public institutions?
And the Microsoft of today, in spite of popular belief, isn't very different. Their priorities may have shifted, but even post Balmer they continued to use their patents portfolio against Android and they continued to fight against the adoption of ODF. Their predatory culture is still there and as seen by the ads and aggressive telemetry in Windows 10, as soon as they can gain some economic advantage, they'll take it, regardless of cost to society.
Their "Microsoft changed" marketing campaign has been genius in its execution. On the other hand I'm glad that they are doing well, because otherwise they have the potential to become the biggest patent troll. Just like when their Windows Phone failed to gain traction, "if you can't innovate, litigate" seems to work well.
Name anyone who died from a single thing 90s Microsoft did.
The modern tech giants take actions every day that are far more anti competitive than anything Microsoft ever did.