Microsoft Corporation

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Microsoft
Founded
Microsoft

(1975-04-04)April 4, 1975
FounderBill Gates and Paul Allen
IndustryInformation Technology.
HeadquartersRedmond, Washington, United States
Website
www.microsoft.com


Microsoft, often abbreviated to MS or M$, is a monopolistic company in the United States. It is the successor to Traf-O-Data.

History

Ownership

The Microsoft Corporation maintains Microsoft Windows, one of the most popularly used computer operating systems.

Controversies

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Embrace-Extend-Extinguish is a strategy Microsoft used to gain control of software standards.

  1. The perpetrator embraces the standards.
  2. The perpetrator forms their implementation of the standards.
  3. The implementation is extended to attract more users than other implementations.
  4. After the implementation gains the majority of users, the suspected implementation locks their extended features from other implementation.

Privacy Breaches

Microsoft is a spy arm of the U.S government. In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA and FBI had direct access to Microsoft's internal servers.[1] In 2017, WikiLeaks revealed that the CIA can hack into Microsoft PCs and use them as microphones for surveillance.[2]

Recuperation of Open Source Software

Microsoft demonized the idea of open source software as a threat to its business in the 1980s.

In 1998, Microsoft formed a strategy to recuperate Open Source software through architecture.[3]

Microsoft identified that there were weaknesses in the architecture and management costs of the open source community.[4]

Microsoft acquired GitHub in June 2018, likely to play upon the monolithic usage of GitHub by most open source projects.

Aggression against the Linux kernel

Microsoft views Linux as a threat to their monopoly on operating systems.

Microsoft listed that the Linux kernel dominated network and server infrastructure; and that Microsoft could add their extensions to some technological commodities to gain some control of the technological standards.[5]

References

  1. Elliott Gabriel (2018-04-06). "Pentagon Capitalism and Silicon Valley: Google’s Drone War Project Shows Big Data’s Military Roots" MintPress News. Archived from the original on 2022-03-28. Retrieved 2022-07-06.
  2. ZeroHedge.com (2017-03-07). "Wikileaks Releases ‘Vault 7’ – The Largest Leak Of Confidential CIA Documents To Date" MintPress News. Archived from the original on 2021-02-15. Retrieved 2022-09-04.
  3. “...[Open Source Software] poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft -- particularly in server space. Additionally the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat.”

    Vinod Valloppillil (1998). Halloween I.
  4. Vinod Valloppillil (1998). Halloween I.
  5. “Linux's homebase is currently commodity network and server infrastructure. By folding extended functionality (e.g. Storage+ in file systems, DAV/POD for networking) into today's commodity services, we raise the bar & change the rules of the game.”

    Vinod Valloppillil (1998). Halloween I.