People who know me tend to think I hate Microsoft. I actually don't. In fact, I think it is great that Bill Gates and his cohort really stuck it to the established IT industry of the 80s and built a monopoly. That's my dream. If I could, I would build a business into a huge empire and make untold billions of dollars. I'm not even jealous of Microsoft. Great for them, nice job. I think the vast majority of folks who work at Microsoft sincerely want to make great products that people want to use, and make a lot of money doing it.
I feel precisely the same way about Microsoft the company as I do about Google (the company). I love it that smart people saw the state of things, came up with a great idea, and relentlessly built it into a successful, huge, company. It's really annoying the turn of the tide on slashdot (for example) against Google: now that they are successful, whiners and crybabies infer all kinds of nefarious plots in any action they take.
What I do hate, and hate with a deep, burning, firey, flaming, boiling, lava-infused, center-of-the-sun, really, really wicked-hot passion: Windows. It really galls me that this complete turd of an operating system is the world de facto standard on desktop computers. And the public at large, and even the vast majority IT professionals just don't realize how terrible it is. And how much better the alternatives are.
Sometime in the future, I'll rant about what is so irksome about Windows. And it's not primarily viruses and spyware, though those certainly do irk me.
