Microsoft: People love to hate them

Microsoft is a company that is loved to be hated. From the ever changing licensing schemes, constant ui changes and feature releases, to people just being annoyed with how thier products function. If you can't find something that gets under your skin, you have to be living in a cave.

My question is, is it fair for them to be hated? It starts off that for many of us, we are forced by our employers to use their products. Given a lack of choice, people resent the experiance. Add in that when I talk to people about thier experience in the workplace, many times their annoyances are caused by unconfigured or misconfigured settings by IT, lack of training, or unfamiliarity with product choices. Recently I had someone complain to me about how hard it was to schedule a conference room, manually looking for rooms, and how bad room scheduler functions. After looking at the problem, IT had never did the background work on our conference rooms. We hadn't built the locations, what rooms where in those locations, or any of the other settings. I bet if I did a survey of my organization, 1% of users would even know what Microsoft Bookings is, let alone how to use it. These problems are on IT to fix, not Microsoft.

Just for a minute, try to imagine doing things at the scale that Microsoft has to do things. With an estimated 230 million users in the US, how do you keep everyone happy? If 80% of users want the start menu changed, and 20% want it to stay the same, if you do it, 46 million users will be upset with that change. Not to mention that they allow support for such a wide variety of hardware for Microsoft products to run on, can you realistically expect it to be failure free?

What does Microsoft do really well? Scalabilitiy and managability. Try being a system admin of 100 laptops running linux. What are you using to manage them at scale? Due to the ability to infinitly customize linux, MDM's are almost the enemy of linux. Is Mac's the option? How do you handle legacy applications? Will the software you need run on them? Microsoft does these things very well, which helps them become the leader in the enterprise enviroment.