Microsoft's original idea was not meant to be intentionally malicious....

[fordy]

Mmmfishtacos said:

badgenome said:

Of course it's not entirely malicious. It's not like they said, "Let's just fuck everyone over!"

But they did look at how much money Halo launches bring in. And they did think about how nice it would be if they got to keep all that loot and retailers got exactly $0. And they did think that was a future they should try to make a reality sooner rather than later. But they did not think for two seconds about how to make this in any way, shape, or form beneficial to the consumer. And they learned a valuable lesson, at least for now.

 

I think that’s exactly what they did. It's what they do. Look at MS history, from the very start. It's been buy and steal their way to the top. And take every penny they can while giving as little as possible. You'd be surprised how malicious the higher ups of big companies can be. While the little guy (programmer) is in love with the idea. The big boss sees dollar signs, "yes this is exactly how well fuck them". 

If Microsoft was nothing but what you stated, then how would it continue to get consumer support for all these years to grow into such a size company to what it is today? I'm not saying that I agree with all of their practises (far from it), but acting this way from the very beginning would have seen it become nothing more than a garage-based company.