Why Does Microsoft Always Get A Free Pass? Why Does Big Business Reek So Badly?

To answer one question from the article is easy... Why does Microsoft hold so much sway with virtually every print publisher and broadcaster? Its as easy as looking at the advertiser's index. Few companies in the tech industry even come close to running as many pages of ads or as many broadcast ads as Microsoft. IBM is probably the only one I can think of that is in the same ballpark. Worse is that a large percentage of the other tech company ads are pushing hardware targeted mainly to the Windows market or software products that run under Windows. And a lot of those ads do indeed carry the little Windows logos.

It just isn't healthy to have a market for ANYTHING where one vendor controls more than 30-40%. If Windows and MS-Office controlled 40% or less of the desktop market we'd see a lot more balanced media treatment and coverage and a lot more innovation. Competition is good, unfortunately it has been a long time since we've had it. In desktop computers it basically died started in the mid 1980s when IBM PC clones running MS-DOS forced out all the other systems except the Mac which was itself relegated to niche market numbers by the early 1990s. By the time Windows started taking off in the early 1990s with Windows 3.1, the ecosystem had already been decimated. By the time Windows 95 shipped the Mac was the only competitor with any significant market share and MS-Office had similarly squeezed out all of its rivals in desktop business productivity software.

The troubles of viruses and malware... well, that's largely related to the software mono-culture resultant from one company's products controlling the entire market. The fact that that company is lazy or downright incompetent about security makes it worse of course.