Criticism
Criticism of Microsoft has followed the company's existence because of various aspects of its products and business practices. Ease of use, stability, and security of the company's software are common targets for critics. More recently, Trojan horses and other exploits have plagued numerous users due to faults in the security of Microsoft Windows and other programs. Microsoft is also accused of locking vendors into their products, and not following and complying with existing standards in its software. Total cost of ownership comparisons of Linux as well as Mac OS X to Windows are a continuous point of debate.
The company has been in numerous lawsuits by several governments and other companies for unlawful monopolistic practices. In 2004, the European Union found Microsoft guilty in a highly publicized anti-trust case. Additionally, Microsoft's EULA for some of its programs is often criticized as being too restrictive as well as being against open source software.
Microsoft has been criticized (along with Yahoo, AOL, and other companies) for its involvement in censorship in the People's Republic of China. Microsoft has also come under criticism for outsourcing jobs to China and India. There were reports of poor working conditions at a factory in southern China that makes some of Microsoft's products.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)