Kenneth Stephen's Journal: Aaarrgghhh! Microsoft!!!!!

I dont consider myself a rabid Microsoft hater. When Microsoft "knifed the baby", I thought it was bad, but since I didnt have any skin in the game, I wasnt angered. When Microsoft was caught doctoring video evidence they produced in court to show their point of view, I thought "Gee, what immoral people they are" in a detached kind of way. When an older-timer colleague explained to me how a particular Windows 3.0 fixpack did nothing other than break Lotus Notes on Windows, I thought it was pretty slimy of them, but I still didnt hate them. Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers" chants, and "I'm going to f*ing kill..." statements were amusing and provided me entertainment, but I still was able to view those incidents as events which werent really impacting me personally.

But then, today, I discovered that, if you are using the IBM JDK, and Firefox (installing the IBM JDK causes (as one would expect) the Java plugin to be enabled for Firefox), and if you ever load up Internet Explorer afterwards, then IE deletes the plugin files for the IBM JDK from the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins directory. The workaround is to mark these files readonly so that bloody IE cant delete the files.

I am outraged.

I would have expected that after all the court judgements against them, that Microsoft would have started paying attention and would have started a good faith attempt at playing the nice guy. But in this instance, I fail to see how this is anything but a deliberate attempt at knifing the Firefox baby. And along the way, taking a swipe at IBM too.

I hope they die. I hope that, after Microsoft dies and all those former employees become jobless, I hope any ventures that they may start die too.