When it comes to matters of consumer software trust, Microsoft is one lousy lover.

If we look at the past few years’ worth of news stories, we can quickly find many Microsoft misdeeds: collecting information on individuals’ use of their operating systems through the global unique ID, security breaches du jour with various Outlook and Outlook Express viruses, patches to Internet Information Server to prevent malicious pieces of code to reveal files stored anywhere on the machine regardless of security settings, badly behaving Active X controls that can do just about any damage to a machine, its own badly configured corporate networks that were easily hacked, rogue security certificates issued by Verisign to people they thought were Microsoft employees but weren’t, Hotmail problems that allowed anyone to open anyone else’s email, Hotmail privacy abuses allowing spammers to harvest their email on Infospace, Hotmail passwords being stolen by various hackers exploiting security loopholes, and numerous other Hotmail service interruptions and privacy problems. And let’s not even get into the blue screen of death and frequent Windows crashes issues, or default security settings for various Microsoft software.

You can read the entire essay here.