Dell has gotten flak for being a very bad enviromnental player
Dell was actually rated no. 1 among computer hardware manufacturers earlier this year in terms of environmental friendliness, by Greenpeace. Apple and Lenovo came out last.
IBM is working overtime to co-opt the open source movement for its own business goals.
There is nothing even remotely "evil" about that. From day one, the open source movement has welcomed business involvement, and companies like IBM and Red Hat have been "co-opting" the "movement" for their own "business goals" since the 1990s, and in the process have contributed a massive amount of functionality to FOSS, and at the same time have ensured that FOSS gets the respect and attention that it deserves in the large enterprise. I would argue that IBM's involvement in Linux in its formative years was one of the key levers that resulted in Linux being such a success in the server market.
3. While we're at it, the corporate misdeeds of Microsoft pale in comparison to real corporate evils - Halliburton mercs making music videos of themselves blindly shooting civilians in Iraq; Monsanto driving millions of peasant farmers around the world to starvation; the sweatshop conditions perpetuated by almost every major clothing label; the wholescale ecological devestation wrought by the major energy companies.
Yes folks, when trying to save face for a company, compare it to those icons of corporate evil, the dreaded scheming energy companies, the evil chemical conglomerates, and of course, Halliburton, the nefarious undead Satan of the corporate world. I'm shocked that you didn't mention Enron in the above.
Yet only Microsoft gets the heat for customer lock-in.
No, it doesn't. Since Microsoft has largely removed its head from its posterior on several of the key lock-in related disputes, and considering that a great deal of FOSS software is increasingly interoperable with Microsoft products anyway, from my observations, I see the attention rapidly shifting to Apple with their iPod-iTunes lock in, and in the enterprise, to Autodesk, which in addition to having the some of the most unrealistic licensing fees imaginable ($65,000+ for Alias StudioTools, for instance), is also known for being one of the most interoperability-hostile software companies out there, with its zealous guarding of the .dwg format.
As for open-source software being the shining excalibur that will save humanity,
Only the most hardcore fanboys believe that about Linux. Heck, as far as I can tell, not even Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman view free software as being -that- important. Free software is merely a useful way for companies and individuals to achieve more flexibility in their network infrastructure, and for developers to create ecosystems around their code. When you look at how difficult and costly it can be to produce software in a traditional, closed-source corporate environment, free software offers a more efficient alternative in which different businesses and individuals can essentially share the burden of developing the software.
In a sense also, your two posts exemplify what I personally dislike about Microsoft:
1. Dismissal of the FOSS "movement" as being some sort of socially-oriented, communistic endeavour to save the world.
2. Distortion of reality to make Microsoft and Microsoft products look superior to everything else, when in fact they are at best equal, if not worse, in all key areas.
3. Tireless, moronic rampaging against IBM and how evil/stupid it is. For me, this is one of the most annoying aspects of Microsoft in general, and you and Steve Ballmer in particular. In my opinion, of all the technology companies out there, IBM is least deserving of criticism, since it basically created the computer industry, the computer software industry, and the personal computer industry, and has been a tireless champion of innovation and free software, and additionally (and this is important to me as the manager of a design firm) has, since the 1950s, been one of the strongest advocates of design in the corporate world.
I am, admittedly, an IBM fanboy (I'm writing this post from my beloved ThinkPad, and at my office use IBM/Lenovo monitors and peripherals even on non-IBM computers), but from my perspective, IBM is simply the ultimate company. They're an ancient, well-established enterprise that has created tens, if not hundreds of millions of jobs and sparked major cultural revolutions over the past century, produces some of the finest hardware and software products in the IT industry, is a champion of design, has a reasonably good ethical track record, and is a consistent innovator. Compare that to Microsoft, which has historically treated design as an afterthought, which has usually preferred to buy or copy rather than innovate, which has terrible ethical standards, and which has probably caused more geniune agony and frustration with its products than any other software company outside of the malware industry.
EDIT: I also find it interesting that IBM, with some level of class, refrains from really vigorous Microsoft-bashing in spite of the fact that Microsoft essentially fucked them with OS/2. Also, Sam Palmisiano, to my knowledge, has never thrown a chair at anyone, unlike his Redmond-based counterpart.
