"Will eat for food" by Mikael Altermark

Summary: Microsoft has commoditised computer 'skills' (Microsoft tools), leading to an environment which hardly rewards professionals for their hard work but does benefit criminals a great deal

IF there is something that's bad for American jobs, it is companies like Microsoft, for reasons we named about an hour ago (don't believe the myths and propaganda around "job creation"). Microsoft lowers the value of workers everywhere and those whom the company helps seem to be cybercrooks who exploit poor design of its software (sometimes deliberately not secure). Publications may fail to call out Windows, but more importantly they fail to explain how malicious features in Microsoft software (like remote spying and back doors) are "aiding and abetting theft," according to Mr. Pogson. Here is his new complaint about it (whether this complaint is legitimate is another matter altogether):

There’s news that police have rounded up a bunch using e-mailed viruses to access bank accounts. Why isn’t M$ in the docket for aiding and abetting? Aren’t the people who made a browser/OS in which clicking on or viewing an e-mail installs a virus just as guilty as the thieves? Remember Napster? Why were they shut down and the trash that M$ distributes as an operating system is allowed to wreck the web?

More nations are still being electronically attacked due to Windows. The "bad guys" have a lot of reasons to like a Windows monoculture because it enables them to take money away from honest people. In this digital age we live in, personal security and financial security are left for software to manage and insecure software may lead to financial and personal disasters (including leaks of sensitive information or easily-preventable deaths in a hospital).

“Microsoft exploits state-funded (taxpayers-funded) schools to sustain its harmful monopoly, early on building an army of people who will support Microsoft software free of charge and make IT Microsoft dependent everywhere.”On a separate topic , Microsoft is trying to further solidify the monopoly it has in schools, aided by the Gates Foundation. Dr. Ravitch, for example, warned about it in her new book [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and people in Texas whose role is to bring GNU/Linux to as many children as possible are openly complaining about it right now. Microsoft exploits state-funded (taxpayers-funded) schools to sustain its harmful monopoly, early on building an army of people who will support Microsoft software free of charge and make IT Microsoft dependent everywhere. Moreover, as pointed out in the very same post, Microsoft is harming the software industry and makes computer professionals rather worthless and disposable. To quote one bit:

By making the software ubiquitous, MS is also making the certs ubiquitous, which means that the salary you can demand with any given cert is lower (supply vs demand) regardless of how easy or difficult it is to achieve that cert. Experience still matters in the workforce, so the ones who are able to climb a few rungs up the steep cert ladder in a timely manner are the ones who are more likely to stay employed long enough to gain experience in the first place. The rest? Suffice to say I have met quite a few grey-haired MCSEs over the past year who have been forced to expand their career options. Thankfully, for their sake, none of them have yet delivered a pizza to my door, but even so...

As Dr. Richard Stallman occasionally stresses (not exact quote or paraphrasing), when support is a monopoly it's badly paid for (the employees, not the customers) and the quality is poor because there is no competition and thus no threat of defection.

“The question is, how long before schools get this memo and serve children's demands for a change?”A society that's predominantly built around Free software will value computer professionals a lot more, even globally. There is a reason why Google, which is built on top of a lot of Free software, succeeds and performs so well in that regard.

Word is out that the Gates-funded Goldman Sachs has just downgraded MSFT and it is hardly surprising. Other analysts recently downgraded MSFT [1, 2], claiming explicitly that schoolchildren were discovering software other than Microsoft's. The question is, how long before schools get this memo and serve children's demands for a change? They too continue to teach children to serve Microsoft, as long as Gates instructs them to. It's truly an injustice. ⬆