A lot of people hate Microsoft. I don’t. If you do hate Microsoft, here are some things to consider, which may make you reconsider your hatred for Microsoft.

1. First one is a “bonus” reason, because it really isn’t related to Microsoft at all, but instead has to do with Bill Gates. It’s included in this list because a good portion of people who hate Microsoft seem to mix up the company with its former CEO. So if you’re one of those people, this reason is for you. Gates has donated more money to charity than any other one person. He founded the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, one of the biggest philanthropic organizations in the world. Not only has he donated almost all of his own money, he regularly campaigns for other rich people to donate their money to help the less fortunate as well. Since retiring from Microsoft, he has become a full time philanthropist. He doesn’t just throw money at the problem, but actively gets involved in understanding the problem of poverty and finding the best way to fix it in the long term. As a result, most of his donations are in the form of investing in education and healthcare in impoverished countries so that future generations can prosper, as opposed to buying and giving away food to the hungry, which only treats the symptoms. In terms of actual results, and assuming you value human welfare and negatively value suffering, Bill Gates has probably done more good to the world than any other person who has ever lived.

2. If you hate Microsoft because they are “evil”, first, think about what the word “evil” means. To me, “evil” implies raping babies. It implies torture. It implies genocide. It implies chaining people up. I don’t mean the figurative chaining of “Oh, I have to use Microsoft Word because everyone else uses it, so I’m chained” while drinking $5 starbucks coffee and reading RSS feeds on your iPhone. I mean literally having chains made of metal oval links, in some damp basement with no light sources, and suffering some sensory deprivation, and needing several years of therapy to overcome. Microsoft is a corporation and corporations don’t have morality. It’s common to try to anthropomorphosize corporations, but it leads to logical fallacies like concluding that a corporation can be “evil”. Corporations seek money. They don’t have any morality, good or bad. If you’re confused about this, read The Corporation (or if you’re lazy, watch the movie instead).

3. If you hate Microsoft because they are monopolistic, then take a look at Google. What search engine do you use? You don’t need to e-mail me, or write a response. I already know the answer: You use Google. If I could go up to a random person and bet $100 that they use Google as their search engine, I’d make a very comfortable living. “Google” is now a verb. Google appears in acronyms (JFGI, GIYF, etc.) Google’s monopoly is much more difficult to dethrone. Microsoft doesn’t black list programs: You can run any program you want on your Windows computer, including programs which crack and disable the activation process of Windows itself. Google black list pages. If Google doesn’t like your webpage, it will simply not show up in any search queries. And since nobody uses any search engine other than Google, your page essentially has ceased to exist on the web. In other words, Google basically has censorship power over the entire web.

4. If you hate Microsoft because they use lock-in tactics, then take a look at Apple. You can’t use iPhone without iTunes. If you’ve been using WinAmp all your life to organize your mp3s, and built up a database of song ratings, playlists, and so on, too fucking bad. Start over from scratch in iTunes. Oh, so you’re installing iTunes now? Well, to use iTunes, you have to also install QuickTime, one of the shittiest movie players ever made. Oh, and now that you’ve got those two installed, for “high priority security” reasons, you should get rid of whatever browser you were using (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, whatever), and use Safari instead.

   The cable I use to connect my iPhone to my computer is wearing out. When it break’s, all I have to buy is a new USB cable for 88 cents, right? Yeah, sorry, but the iPhone basically uses USB technology, but they changed the shape of the plug, and no one makes these cables except Apple, so you’re looking at $19.

5. If you hate Microsoft because you think they’ll do the minimum they can get away with without getting sued, consider these two tales. Wal-Mart experimented with selling DRMed music. DRMed music, in case you’re not familiar with the concept, are like mp3 files, except every time you want to play the song, your computer needs to connect to Wal-Mart’s servers to verify your credentials to make sure you’ve paid for the right to listen to that song. It turned out that this wasn’t profitable enough, so Wal-Mart shut down the servers which meant that your computer could no longer connect, and thus you lost all the music you’ve paid for. And the music execs argued that this is perfectly normal, and you should expect to lose access to music you’ve already paid for.

   In contrast, Microsoft opened up a service called PopFly. It was a site designed to allow non-programmers to create their own games, and upload them and share them with the public. It was like YouTube, except instead of contributing amateur videos, you contributed amateur games. Microsoft decided that there wasn’t enough demand for this service, so they decided to shut down the server. The difference between this and Wal-Mart is that Microsoft then specifically hired programmers to write a “downloader” program that lets you download the games off of PopFly and play them offline before they finally disappear for good. In other words, Microsoft put money and effort to ensure that nobody lost access to anything they’ve put on PopFly.

6. If you hate Microsoft because they’re anti-open-source, consider that Microsoft has contributed several open source projects under their Shared Source License, and have even contributed to the Linux Kernel under the GPL. Those who argue that MS only contributed to the Kernel for selfish reasons (the contribution makes Linux work better in a VM environment running under Windows) needs to recall the core of the open source philosophy, which is every programmer improving the underlying software by contributing patches which scratch their specific itches. Linus made Linux for “selfish” reasons, in that he wasn’t satisfied with any of the other OS kernels out there. Those who argue that this contribution is some sort of “trap” seem to simply not have much faith in the open source software (OSS) methodology at all: If anyone can submit code to an open source project to destroy it, and there is no maintainer who will verify the submission before it gets integrate into every copy of Linux all over the world, then wouldn’t that imply OSS is a pretty crappy way of developing software? If Microsoft can do some legal magic to somehow screw Linux over while licensing code under the GPL, doesn’t that imply that the GPL is fundamentally broken and flawed?

Finally, here’s a bonus story: in the movie 2002 Minority Report, there’s a scene where someone is using a desk with a built in touch-sensitive monitor. In 2007, Microsoft announced essentially exactly that type of computer, called the “Microsoft Surface”. People complained that Microsoft was unable to innovate, this device clearly being a rip-off of the computer from Minority Report. It turns out that the computer used in Minority Report was a prototype of the Microsoft Surface which Microsoft left to the producers of the movie. (It’s quite easy to verify that Microsoft was closely involved in the Minority Report movie, given how often the MSN logo appears all over the place).

Note that there are basically only two “famous” multitouch devices: the Microsoft Surface and Apple’s iPhone. Note that Microsoft essentially (stealthily) demoed the Microsoft Surface in 2002, via the Minority Report movie. Note that the iPhone was first announced in 2007. Note how nobody whines about how Apple is unable to innovate, simply copying ideas from sci-fi movies.

One thing that often confounds game theorist, economists and (while I can’t speak for other autistic people,) myself, is that people often don’t behave in a rational manner. Before jumping to any conclusions, you should first verify that you what it means to “behave in a rational manner.” In particular, you should avoid using any straw vulcans:

A [straw vulcan is a] straw man used to show that emotion is better than logic.

It starts by having characters who think “logically” try to solve a problem. And they can’t. Either they can’t find any answer, or they’re caught in some kind of standoff, or they’re even stuck in a Logic Bomb-type loop. Once this is established, someone who uses good old human emotion comes up with a solution that the logical thinker can’t. This proves An Aesop that emotion is superior and that the logical thinker shouldn’t trust logic so much.

This is, of course, completely broken. Fiction often gets the concept of logic wrong in a number of ways.

A true rationalist — by which I include competent game theorists and economists… and myself! — is aware that most other people are not rational. That’s not the confounding part. The confounding part is just how damn irrational people can be. Perhaps even more confounding is the fact an irrational (but otherwise reasonable) person is able to persist in a specific irrational behaviour, even after having been shown that such behaviour is irrational.

Dan Gilbert has an excellent TED Talk where he gives an excellent example of irrational behaviour. Paraphrased from memory, he says:

Imagine you want to see a play, and in your wallet, you have a twenty dollar bill, and a ticket for a play which you’ve paid twenty dollars for. Upon arriving at the theatre, you take out your wallet, and realize you’ve lost the movie ticket. Will you buy a new ticket with your remaining twenty dollar bill? Most people would say no. They say to themselves “I’ve already paid for this ticket once! I don’t want to pay $40 instead of $20 to see this play!”

Now imagine you want to see the play, and in your wallet, you have two twenty dollar bills. You arrive at the theatre, and you realize you’ve lost one of your bills. Will you buy a new ticket with your remaining twenty dollar bill? Most people would say yes. They say to themselves “Well, I cam here specifically to see the play, right? What does the lost of the $20 have to do with anything?”

In case it isn’t exceedingly clear, notice that in both cases, you had two pieces of paper in your wallet, each of which you could have exchanged to watch a play which you did indeed wanted to see. In both cases, you lost one of those two pieces of paper, and you had to opportunity to exchange the remaining piece of paper to see the play. So why is it in one case you decided to see the play, and in the other you decided no to see the play?

(Note that of the three paragraphs “quoted” from memory, I took the most liberties with the third one, where I’m pretty sure I belaboured the point much more strongly than Gilbert did, but I wasn’t comfortable taking it out of the quote block, and claiming it as my own words, as all of the ideas are from Gilbert.)

So what astonishes us rationalist is not so much that people behave in the way that Gilbert describes. Probably most rationalist behaved the same way before hearing Gilbert speak. What is astonishing is after hearing this talk from Gilbert, irrational people will laugh, say “Yes, it’s true…” and then continue to behave in that way.

Traditionally, researchers would try to “rationalize” (pun intended) this behaviour, the prototypical example being the Ultimatum game. In the Ultimatum game, one player (usually referred to as “A”) is given a certain amount of money (e.g. $100) and is given the opportunity to share any amount of it to a second player, player “B”. The catch is that player “B” has the option of rejection the money, in which case both players receive nothing. In a world involving purely rational agents, B should accept any and all offers above $0, because receiving any amount of money at all is better than receiving nothing. A knows this, and thus will always offer B the minimum, e.g. giving himself $99, and B $1. When this game is played practice, B will instead usually reject any offer which seems “unfair”. For example, B will often reject an offer of $20. Traditionally, a rationalist would wonder why B would do this, since they are throwing away an offer for a free twenty bucks. The rationalization is that perhaps humans, being highly social creatures, are rejecting the offer as a form of punishment. That is, B is willing to forego the short term benefits of $20 in exchange of the longterm benefits of punishing those who would treat others unfairly, and thus promote fairness in the society that they both live in. I’ll refer to this as the “punishment” theory.

A recent experiment has shown this not to be case. In this modified version of the ultimatum game (in the study, they called the modified version the “private impunity game”), A is again given some amount of money, and free to split it between himself and player B in any way he sees fit. The difference now is that whatever split player A decides on, he immediately gets to keep and leaves the game. All that remains is to take whatever sum that A had left over, and offer it to B, who is then free to accept it or reject it. In other words, in this variant of the game, B has no opportunity to actually punish A, not even via guilt, seeing as how A will have left from the game before B ever has the chance to make the decision of whether to accept or reject the offer. And yet it turns out even in this case, B will occasionally reject the offer, harming no one but themselves! The rejection rate is not quite as high as in the Ultimatum game, thus giving some credence to the “punishment” theory, but simultaneously, the fact that there is any rejection at all strongly argues against the “punishment” theory.

Perhaps equally frightening was a secondary result of the study, which revealed that if the rules of the “Impunity” game were explained more formally and succinctly as a series of if-then statements, rather than as natural English (i.e. in the form “if A chooses X and B chooses Y, then A receives $i and B receives $j.”) the rejection rates reverted back to those of the Ultimatum game, suggesting “that people can’t even be bothered to perform a rational analysis when money is on the line, much less engage in rational actions.” This conclusion really drained the blood from my head, and I had to sit down to regain my composure.

As a human, I’m genetically encoded to have empathy for fellow human beings. But… well, I don’t know how to express this next part adequately, but in when someone differs fundamentally from your way thinking, you lose empathy and see them as an alien (or more commonly, a “monster”). Consider any sociopathic serial killer, for example. Or less dramatically, a presumably insane homeless person screaming in the streets. Most people don’t feel sympathy nor empathy for these homeless, but rather an extreme discomfort and a desire to ignore and get away from the person, to pretend that they do no exist in your world.