MS has terrible taste (as Jobs famously pointed out), and a lot of people hate companies with a bad sense of fashion and taste. That's a big reason why people hate walmart, I expect.
MS has been a bully and has used its size to gain an unfair advantage from time to time. However, in general I'd say that MS is actually less guilty of this sort of thing than the average run-of-the-mill company of a similar size. Compare and contrast with, say, AEG, Bank of America, or Archer-Daniels-Midland for example. On a properly calibrated evil-o-meter MS hardly registers.
Finally, it's easy to develop a strong mental picture of a hypothetical "better" world, even if that world is wholly impractical. There are fundamental reasons why linux, to this day, is still not the best choice for the average consumer desktop. Even down to a fundamental technological design level there are good reasons why that's so (though there's also android, which still has a delicious linux core). The truth is that "the man" hasn't been holding back electric car technology, solar power, and linux on the desktop merely to prop up big oil and Microsoft. Sometimes it takes time for competing technologies to mature to a level to where they are actually competitive. Linux has done awesomely in the server market, for example, even despite MS's massive expenditures to make substantial inroads.
MS has terrible taste (as Jobs famously pointed out), and a lot of people hate companies with a bad sense of fashion and taste. That's a big reason why people hate walmart, I expect.
MS has been a bully and has used its size to gain an unfair advantage from time to time. However, in general I'd say that MS is actually less guilty of this sort of thing than the average run-of-the-mill company of a similar size. Compare and contrast with, say, AEG, Bank of America, or Archer-Daniels-Midland for example. On a properly calibrated evil-o-meter MS hardly registers.
Finally, it's easy to develop a strong mental picture of a hypothetical "better" world, even if that world is wholly impractical. There are fundamental reasons why linux, to this day, is still not the best choice for the average consumer desktop. Even down to a fundamental technological design level there are good reasons why that's so (though there's also android, which still has a delicious linux core). The truth is that "the man" hasn't been holding back electric car technology, solar power, and linux on the desktop merely to prop up big oil and Microsoft. Sometimes it takes time for competing technologies to mature to a level to where they are actually competitive. Linux has done awesomely in the server market, for example, even despite MS's massive expenditures to make substantial inroads.