It's very difficult to explain to people why Microsoft is such a bad company. In a nutshell, there are several main reasons why I personally hate them with inordinate passion:
1) Crappy software: M$ has gotten most people used to software that doesn't work, OSs that consistently crash, user interfaces that are clunky and ineffective. By doing this, they ensure that folks will continually need to upgrade to the next less buggy release of a piece of software. In fact, software should not crash at all. If it does, it's not finished. M$ software is never finished and users of their software are in effect beta testers (who should probably be getting paid :)
2) Horrific development environment: developers themselves can't be held entirely responsible for the junk software available for the M$ platforms. I feel truly sorry for the guys out there having to work with the M$ API and the crap tools such as Visual Whatever. The complexity of this environment essentially forces developers to rely on tools that create bloatware (code that is huge, ineffective and slow). By ignoring standards (such as ANSI) or corrupting standards (such as Java), M$ locks non-M$ developers out of its platform and locks M$ developers in. Oh I could go on and on here.
3) Corporate practices: M$ is notorious in this area. Recent Federal Court proceedings resulted in a couple of useless icons in the M$ start menu, and that's about it. M$ continues to kill off good companies and great technology. Anyone with technology that threatens the M$ monopoly will inevitably be squashed (ProComm) or bought and then squashed. Any company that targets M$ competition (SCO) will be looking forward to hefty payoffs (aka investments) from Mr. Gates.
4) File formats: I believe that M$'s key in holding it's monopoly lies in its file formats. Imagine if Word produced documents that could be read and written by something other than Word (this is slowly coming to pass no thanks to M$)? Why would someone then pay $300 for Word when they can download a free, and likely better, app off the web? What if M$ Money stored its data in XML files? Folks could try out Quicken, MoneyDance or even gnucash :) They wouldn't even need Windows now. What if all of M$ multimedia apps used standard, open formats instead of M$ specific ones? We would no longer need Windows to view a certain website or listen to a certain song. Oh, and don't forget folks, print out those Word docs and tape record those Windows music files, because I can assure you, they will be unreadable at some point down the road (try opening a Word I doc in Windows today and see what you get :)
Well, now I'm all worked up and likely to become an incoherent drooling mass here shortly, so I'll point you to a website that explains all this stuff much better than I can.
If you truly do not understand why M$ is bad for *everyone* but M$ shareholders, please read: Why I Hate Microsoft.
Good Day!