The Monday morning missive got right to the point:
"I find it simultaneously strange, amazing and utterly incomprehensible that your news publications continue to write business articles about Microsoft that appear to elevate and lend credibility to their organisation. It's almost as if I am reading something coming out of the Pyongyang press!"
There's no doubt that Kim Jong-il longs to direct technology coverage at CNET News.com, though I can assure one and all that neither the dear leader nor any of his comrades are in line to direct our editorial operations any time soon.
The email was not altogether exceptional, when you consider how Microsoft has become a latter-day Rorschach test for people who are passionate about their technology.
But it takes on a larger context when you tally in years of Microsoft-hating feedback detailing the enormity of this single company's misdeeds.
Sociologists would need to spend years getting to a root explanation, but this much is incontestable: there's a certain something about this particular company that pushes some folks over the edge.
Microsoft-bashing was in vogue long before the US Department of Justice hauled the company into court on antitrust charges in 1998. Some trace the resentment to the storied 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in which a 21-year-old Gates publicly chastised a group of developers for pirating his software. The backlash was immediate. (Paying for software? What a whiner!)
The label stuck. In time, Gates -- and by extension, Microsoft -- came to be viewed through a different prism. Unlike other early PC entrepreneurs doing their thing to make the world a better place for humanity, Microsoft got slammed for conducting business like marauding Huns. They were without morals, they were without ethics and on top of everything else, they made lousy software.
Even the anarchists got pissed at Gates, nailing him a few years ago with a cream pie.
Microsoft has public-relations baggage that's hard to shake. And as the technology industry's most famous convicted predatory monopolist, the company will never again win the benefit of the doubt. Still, the psycho nature of the conspiracy theorists is something to behold.
Talkback
I'm surprised gates can even write open letters! I thought he had a phobia of that word, let alone that something he wrote would be open for everyone... maybe he should only publish 'closed letters' and try to make money out of them. Or better: maybe better never to open those letters!
Sjaaksken
Tosh like this is why I have stopped reading ZDNet online. If only all of your reporters had the same outlook as Rupoert Goodwins, not this 'Microsoft can do no wrong' attitude.
Two reports on today's news sum it up - a report that unprotected PCs will only last 20 minutes if not patched and also the news that Microsoft are delaying the release of SP2 until the end of the month as it is causing more problems than anticipated. Charles - wake up and smell the roses. Microsoft is just a company, not some kind of deity that deserves defending.
Cheers to the bloke from the UK for proving the point of this article that Microsoft brings out the whack job conspiracists. Both of his references are false. An unpatched PC will last indefinitely - just turn on XP's personal firewall, dummy! As for SP2, it's been available for download on microsoft.com since 8-10. People like the two who have already posted to this article are necessary in the world. They are the critics whose irrational rants drive us to stretch ourselves just a little more, just to shut them up!
Did you really get paid to write that article? Wow.