Microsoft is one of the largest and most successful companies in the history of the technology industry. With a market cap of over $2 trillion, billions of users worldwide, and an ever-expanding lineup of software and hardware products, the company‘s dominance seems unassailable.
However, Microsoft is also one of the most disliked and criticized companies in the tech world. Over its 40+ year history, Microsoft has repeatedly angered customers, crushed competitors, and abused its market power. The company has a reputation for mediocre products, deceptive business practices, and a cutthroat corporate culture.
As a long-time follower of the tech industry who has used Microsoft products for decades, I‘ve had a front row seat to many of the company‘s worst fumbles and misdeeds. In this article, I‘ll lay out the case for why Microsoft is so bad and has earned the ire of so many.
Crushing Competition and Stifling Innovation
One of the biggest knocks against Microsoft is its long history of monopolistic practices aimed at neutralizing competition through almost any means necessary. The most infamous example is the company‘s battle against Netscape in the 1990s browser wars.
As the upstart Netscape Navigator browser began to threaten Microsoft‘s operating system monopoly, Bill Gates and company sprang into action. Microsoft started bundling its own Internet Explorer browser with Windows, free of charge. It strong-armed PC makers into making IE the default browser on new computers. It even proposed dividing up the browser market with Netscape to avoid competition, according to documents revealed in Microsoft‘s eventual antitrust trial.
Microsoft‘s hardball tactics against Netscape drew the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, which sued Microsoft in 1998 for violating antitrust laws. During the trial, piles of internal Microsoft emails and memos came to light revealing the extent of the company‘s anti-competitive scheming. In 2000, a federal judge ruled that Microsoft had indeed abused its Windows monopoly and engaged in a variety of illegal practices to crush rivals.
But Netscape was hardly the only competitor steamrolled by Microsoft over the years:
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In the early 2000s, Microsoft tried to extinguish the open-source Linux operating system, which then-CEO Steve Ballmer called "a cancer." Microsoft funded the SCO Group, which launched meritless IP lawsuits against companies using Linux in hopes of scaring them off the platform.
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Up against Sony and Nintendo in the gaming console market, Microsoft began requiring game publishers to pay Microsoft a fee for every Xbox game sold, even if Microsoft wasn‘t involved in developing or publishing the game. "The idea was to make it more expensive and harder for publishers to support multiple platforms," a former Microsoft executive later admitted.
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After being blindsided by the rise of Google and online advertising in the early 2000s, Microsoft began pouring billions into its own Bing search engine. But even with all that spending, Bing gained little traction. Leaked internal reports showed that nearly half of Bing‘s ad revenue came from ads Microsoft itself was buying on Bing to juice the numbers.
Again and again, Microsoft has shown itself willing to engage in dirty tricks and throw around its financial muscle to neutralize emerging competitive threats. Along the way, many promising technologies and companies that could have developed into real alternatives to Microsoft‘s products have instead been snuffed out.
Mediocre Products and Poor Quality
For a company with virtually unlimited resources, Microsoft has a surprisingly poor track record when it comes to releasing high-quality, innovative software. The company‘s two cash cow products, Windows and Office, have both seen many subpar releases over the years.
Windows in particular has been plagued by buggy, unstable versions that frustrated users. Windows Me, Windows Vista, and Windows 8 were all widely panned. Vista had so many performance issues, driver incompatibilities, and intrusive security pop-ups that many PC manufacturers offered to "downgrade" new computers to the older Windows XP.
Even the generally well-received Windows 7 and 10 came with crapware like Candy Crush preinstalled and increasing amounts of ads scattered throughout the interface. More worryingly, Windows has been hit with a never-ending series of critical security vulnerabilities, with new flaws being discovered on a nearly weekly basis. For an operating system that runs on over 1 billion devices, that‘s an unacceptable state of affairs.
Microsoft‘s issues with software quality aren‘t just limited to Windows. Microsoft Office, especially its Windows version, has long had a reputation for being bloated, slow, and prone to crashing. The Office ribbon interface, first introduced in Office 2007, initially confused and frustrated many users who found it cluttered and unintuitive.
Outside its two flagship products, Microsoft has struggled to innovate or gain traction in new markets:
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Microsoft was late to the smartphone party and squandered its early lead with Windows Mobile. It then spent billions acquiring and propping up Nokia‘s phone business, only to write off the entire value of the purchase a few years later as Windows Phone‘s market share slid into the low single digits.
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The Zune MP3 player was supposed to be Microsoft‘s "iPod killer." But the device was a flop, known mostly for its "squirting" feature that let users awkwardly beam songs to each other. Microsoft discontinued all Zune hardware in 2011.
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Microsoft‘s Bing search engine has lost billions of dollars over the years as it failed to make a dent in Google‘s market share. Bing‘s search results are generally considered inferior to Google‘s and the engine is known for being littered with low-quality junk content and scams.
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After seeing the success of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft scrambled to launch its own cloud platform, Azure. But Azure has been dogged by reliability issues, with major outages occurring on a regular basis. In one recent incident, an Azure Active Directory outage prevented customers from logging into Office 365 and other services for hours.
Customer-Hostile Business Practices
Microsoft has a well-deserved reputation for using manipulative and customer-hostile sales and marketing tactics, especially when targeting its large enterprise clients.
For years, Microsoft sales reps have pressured companies into signing long-term volume licensing agreements by threatening audits and steep penalties for even minor license violations. Customers are pushed to buy Software Assurance, an expensive maintenance plan that entitles you to new software versions, even if you‘re happy with your current setup and have no plans to upgrade.
Microsoft is also notorious for its complex and ever-changing licensing rules. Figuring out the right mix of licenses you need practically requires an advanced accounting degree. Inevitably, companies over-provision and end up with unused licenses they still have to pay for, to the tune of billions of dollars per year.
On the consumer side, in recent years Microsoft has turned to increasingly aggressive ads and upselling. Windows 10 constantly nags users with notifications to switch to the paid Microsoft 365 service. Ads for Microsoft Edge browser pop up when you search for "Chrome" or "Firefox" in the Windows start menu. Microsoft even experimented with showing ads in the Windows 11 File Explorer, though it backtracked after public outcry.
Another perennial frustration for Microsoft customers is the company‘s poor support and customer service. If you try to contact Microsoft for help with a problem, you‘ll likely get bounced between departments and spend hours on hold, only to end up with a script-reading rep who struggles to provide a solution. I‘ve personally experienced this runaround more times than I can count.
Privacy and Telemetry Concerns
In the age of surveillance capitalism, almost every major tech company is trying to vacuum up as much user data as possible. But even in that context, Microsoft stands out for the intrusiveness and opacity of its data collection practices.
Starting with Windows 10, Microsoft turned telemetry data collection on by default and provided users with few options to turn it off. Behind the scenes, Windows now constantly phones home to Microsoft‘s servers with data on your hardware, software usage, browsing history, location, and more. Microsoft claims this data is only used to improve products and personalize experiences, but it provides little transparency into exactly what data is collected and how it‘s used.
Privacy advocates have raised alarms about the inability to fully disable Windows telemetry without resorting to hacks that break other functionality. Windows 11 Home requires an internet connection and Microsoft account to even finish setup, raising further concerns about mandatory data collection.
It‘s not just Windows that‘s siphoning up user data. Microsoft Office collects detailed telemetry on documents and email. The Cortana virtual assistant hoovers up voice and text conversations. Even the humble Windows Calculator app was caught unnecessarily sending data back to Microsoft‘s servers.
If you‘re privacy-conscious, Microsoft‘s products and services are becoming an increasingly bad choice compared to alternatives that collect less data and provide more user control.
Toxic Work Culture
Based on insider reports and employee reviews, Microsoft‘s internal culture is highly dysfunctional. The company is notorious for its toxic levels of infighting, back-stabbing and turf wars between divisions.
A much-discussed 2012 Vanity Fair article, "Microsoft‘s Lost Decade," painted a picture of a company paralyzed by bureaucracy, indecision and internal politicking. Employees and executives focused more on carving out fiefdoms and undermining rivals than on innovating or serving customers.
Microsoft‘s employee review system, called stack ranking, was a big contributor to this toxic environment. Under stack ranking, employees were graded on a curve, with a set percentage required to be labeled as low performers. This encouraged employees to prioritize looking good over producing results. Backstabbing and sabotage were rampant as workers tried to protect their own standing by throwing colleagues under the bus.
While CEO Satya Nadella ended stack ranking when he took over in 2014, elements of that toxic culture persist. In a 2021 employee survey, only 66% of Microsoft employees said they believed the company‘s senior leadership was acting with integrity. During the pandemic, many employees complained about unmanageable workloads and a lack of work-life balance as Microsoft pushed aggressive growth targets.
Conclusion
For all its financial success, Microsoft is a company with serious and deep-rooted problems. Its history of unethical conduct, subpar products, customer-hostile practices and dysfunctional culture have left it despised by many.
Recent stumbles like the buggy Windows 11 launch and mass layoffs have shown that Microsoft is still prone to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Until the company takes meaningful steps to address these long-standing issues, it will continue to be one of the most-hated giants of the tech world.
