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A company is supposed to hire people based on their skills and pay them accordingly. "Accordingly" means they need to contribute more to the bottom line than they cost. Good companies are fair about the ratio, bad companies might try to benefit a lot more than they pay.
If a company and its officers are caught failing to consider the bottom line, the company and its higher officers are subject to civil (and maybe criminal) penalties for fiduciary irresponsibility.
If an officer in a position of fiduciary responsibility bad-mouths his company to rank and file employees, the result is likely to be sub-par performance. That officer is guilty of a crime.
If a company is not found guilty of fiduciary irresponsibility, but is performing poorly, the supporters (investors, stockholders, etc.) will eventually ream them a new asshole, put new people on the board, demand that responsible managers be fired, anything they can find the power to do.
About the only way a company can evade this sort of oversight is to be totally private. That is, the only people that can be hurt are the people that are doing wrong.
You may be a member of a zillion forums. If so, you will find lebenty-zillion MS bashers and other fanboys of that type are almost invariably young punk kids that have never had to deal with reality.
MS has cost a lot of people a lot of headaches with poor code, but they haven't cost very many people anything significant in the way of $$. A Windows system typically has Windows bundled in when it's bought. Barebones, without an OS, it probably wouldn't be $20 cheaper.
When a geeky type gets pissed off at the problems he/she might encounter with Windows, he/she jumps almost invariably to Linux, tries 4 or 5 different distributions, and screws around for absolutely hours before arriving at a stable configuration. Once there, the search is on for simple applications that can perform day-to-day tasks as effectively as free-to-cheap-to expensive applications that flood the market and run under Windows.
Anyone who really needs a good OS will use neither Windows nor a common Unix clone. They will get a good one, and they will pay for it.
Bashing a company simply because it is successful and has made its founders rich is a child's activity, fueled by bloggers whose level of true knowledge is minimal.
Google has already become a second "evil empire" because it's so successful. I daresay the large majority of the Google bashers still use it because there isn't really anything that does the job so well (I personally think that's changing, but we'll see).
MS hires a lot of people. I'd love to see the figures on how many of those hirees have dined with El Bill. LOL!
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