The various responses to my "embrace, extend, extinguish" got me thinking about why I continue to be apprehensive about Microsoft. Perhaps it is because of my e

The various responses to my "embrace, extend, extinguish" got me thinking about why I continue to be apprehensive about Microsoft. Perhaps it is because of my experiences with Microsoft and their dirty ways. They have a history of screwing the user over. A bit of a rant/recall follows: I had lost content to a doublespace bug and was asked to pay for drive space via an MS DOS upgrade to 6.22, I have seen how Microsoft encouraged piracy in schools and colleges in India, how they have used FUD to suppress open source education and adoption efforts in the government and education spaces. I also recollect all the dirty stuff around Frontpage "extensions", IE extensions + IE's excessively forgiving tendencies to HTML violations and incorrectness, how MS took spyglass software and did bad things with it. Later, the Haloween Documents showed how MS said one thing in public and plotted another thing in private. They were Gurus of scheming behaviour. Then there was the Microsoft Windows tax, where you had to pay the Windows license fee even if you planned to run Linux on your computer. I also had to struggle with the MS Java, J++ rubbish. Microsoft used to do such bad things so deliberately. I also recall bad things around UEFI, around making it difficult for Linux distros to dual boot on laptops (which got resolved later). Recollecting all of the above doesn't make it easy for me just to accept that with some code releases and PR announcements, MS would have turned over a new leaf. People behave as they are measured. Satya Nadella is changing the public image of Microsoft, and even walking the talk. I learned just now on Wikipedia that he tripled MS stock, and that anonymous polls within MS have called him the best CEO of a US company. I am not an MS employee, so I won't know if he has managed to change the internal cultural tendency of being insincere and vicious (see above for examples). I'm just apprehensive that at the end of the day, he is just an employee. Employees can get fired anytime, overruled anytime. Perhaps I am being unfair to MS and Satya Nadella, and to all those MS employees who are giving their best. To them all - I apologise for my ill will.