Nonsense. The number of people who didn't want DOS/Windows with their computer when they bought it is numbered in the single digits or below percent. He didn't increase his fortune in any measurable way by "forcing" the unwilling to buy his OS.

Like this one?

On /., aren't fanatics with guns and developers mostly synonymous? Feels like it if you have the audacity to claim Microsoft is not All Evil (TM).

We are talking about Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs.

Such as? This is actually a serious question. From whom did he steal? What people did he take advantage of? Who were these creative people?

By not having first-rate competition. Which first-rate products did their shady practices out-compete through shady business practices?

They did? Who was stamped out? Digital Research? Hardly. Linux? Don't make me laugh.

Who was harmed. Please use some examples.

The most quoted example of this seems to be a specific version of IE. It killed off Netscape, not because it was evil but because Microsoft tried to innovate just a little. I'll agree that it wasn't a particularly good way to innovate, but it was that particular version of IE, today slammed and hated, was a huge improvement over Netscape. It also, through the XmlHttpRequest object, launched what we now all do, namely Web 2.0, DOM manipulation (not much of a point unless you had the XmlHttpRequest object) and what we now "love" about Single Page Apps.

ActiveX and many, many other things, the fact that IE6 was neglected for so long for example, were bad behaviors, and we (and Microsoft by the way) still suffer the consequences. Don't see how it killed anyone or anything though. Netscape was an abhorrent monster long before IE6 came along. Thank goodness for the likes of Opera and (later) Google though.

Was that evil? Why?The alternative was Linux (in reality) and Linux on the desktop back then was a joke, a cruel, bad, pathetic joke. Today it is just a bad, pathetic joke, and it doesn't have to deal with this "evil" by Microsoft. The OEM agreements may have harmed Digital Research a tiny bit, but not by much.

The main pieces of software where Microsoft have made money were (besides the OS), Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Word has a formidable competitor in Word Perfect, but Microsoft didn't kill WP in a sneaky, under-handed way. Microsoft killed WP when the morons at the Word Perfect team refused to release a functional product for Windows. Microsoft Word 2.0 was a product that was heads and shoulders above Word Perfect in usability. Sure, if you wanted to write a book with annotations etc, WP was still more functional, but most people do not want to do that. Most people write a page or five and they do not even care about styles (which they should). WP "died" because the people developing WP were morons. Excel - same thing. It was a huge success on the Mac, and when Microsoft released it properly for Windows, the competition committed suicide.

Were you born retarded or did your father hit you over the head with a hammer throughout your youth to achieve this? There is nothing dumber than MS haters on Slashdot.

Sigh. There is nothing wrong with me, and I'll try to show you again. I understand meta-discussions are difficult, and you are obviously not particularly well educated as it comes to logic and language. So, let's break this down a little. Let's start with the belief in a tea pot. There are three main elements to the statement "I believe in a tea pot". They are the subject, "I", the action "believe" and the object "a tea pot". Then there is the negation, NOT. This gives us:

SUBJECT(I) ACTION(believe) OBJECT(NOT tea pot) => no presence of tea pot in "the believing area of my mind"
SUBJECT(I) ACTION(NOT believe) OBJECT(tea pot) => no presence of tea pot in "the believing area of my mind"

So, in your mind, the fact that both situations end up with the non-existence of a tea pot in "the believing area of my mind", the two actions must be the same. This is where you fail. Remember, we are specifically talking about the action of belief, and though the two ACTIONS above, namely believing and not believing are diametrically opposite, we end up with the same result, no presence of tea pot in "the believing area of my mind". Your fallacious assumption is that because we end up with the same result, the ACTIONS are the same, they are not. Now, after these exchanges, I do realize that you will not understand this, so therefore let's create another sentence with exactly the same logical content but a different action and object. This time, let's use "look through a microscope" as action and "bacteria" as an object. We then get:

SUBJECT(I) ACTION(look through a microscope) OBJECT(NOT bacteria) => no presence of bacteria in "the visualization area of my mind"
SUBJECT(I) ACTION(NOT look through microscope) OBJECT(bacteria) => no presence of bacteria in "the visualization area of my mind"

Is it really your contention that looking through a microscope to see no bacteria is the same as not looking through the microscope and therefore ending up with no bacteria visualization are the same? Is the action of not looking through a microscope the same as the action of looking through a microscope and not seeing anything the same?

I don't believe. In anything at all. I have zero beliefs. In total. When I converse with someone about reality and stuff, I have to make an assumption that could be tantamount to a belief. I will have to assume that the world (universe if you wish) is observable by all within it, and that the experience of observing aspects of it are very similar for all of us. In other words, I have to assume that if we watch an apple "fall down" from a tree, you and I both will agree that there was an apple falling down. If that is not so, all discussions about the nature of the universe become pointless.

This is the only trace of "belief" you will find in my entire being. I believe in nothing else.

Not in English, and not using logic. "I believe" and "I do not believe" are the exact opposite. Try running it by an adult.

No, they are not. Not even close. The first goes to the existence of my belief, it doesn't exist. The second states I have a belief, a belief there is no teapot. You should get a refund from your English teacher.

As in math - simplify. Statement 1:I have no belief. Statement 2: I have a belief. They are not equivalent, they are opposites.