But they also tried buyng out Nintendo.  Microsoft = monopolist.  Not good no matter how you spin it.

Got any proof?  And "serious" could mean anything.  It doesn't change the FACT that Microsoft tried to aquire Nintendo.  Let's not interject things just to "prove" a point.

This doesn't sound very serious to me.  This never even came close to happening.

How Nintendo boss silenced Steve Ballmer

By Nick Farrell: Thursday, 06 January 2005, 9:10 AM

NOW HE IS safely retired, the 77-year old former Nintendo boss Hiroshi Yamaushi is regaling Wired magazine about how he reverted to abuse to silence the mighty Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Apparently Microsoft was making a bid to buy Nintendo for absolutely huge amounts of money. Vole was confident that Nintendo would take it. The Game Cube wasn't doing particularly well at the time and there was a lot of money involved. Ballmer himself showed up at the negotiations to have a quiet word.

However Yamaushi didn't like the deal, which he saw as a loss on a level similar to World War Two. He said he ranted a bit about Japanese values and identity but it went no-where. So in the end he said in Japanese "suck my yellow balls Mr Ballmer".

The translator looked embarrassed and was clearly not translating the phrase exactly, although Ballmer did smile at a sentence that included the word 'yellow' in it.

Frustrated Yamaushi stood on a chair, put his hands around his mouth and very slowly and in English said: "Hey Ballmer why don't you suck my tiny yellow balls."

He said Ballmer and team were speechless. They were as scandalised as if he had shown them a nipple at the Superbowl, he said.

It is nice to know that high powered board room meetings involving billions of dollars use the same language and methodology of a Kave piss-up. A copy of the interview can be found here but is probably illegal so you should buy a copy of the February issue of Wired.

link: http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/01/06/how-nintendo-boss-silenced-steve-ballmer

Hmmm a lot of Microsoft hate in that, tempered with ignorance of course.

If your second paragraph is true, I would encourage you to look into the histories of such companies as IBM, Walmart, Standard Oil, and pretty much the entire life history of a man named Andrew Carnegie.  A working knowledge of each would be beneficial anyway.  ^_^

I read stuff like this and I just have to laugh. 

I too know a company that used an incredible hype machine to crush an innovative, lower priced competitor, in order to ensure it's monopolistic pricing and stranglehold on it's industry, forcing developers to cow-tow to it's no money for exclusives policy.

This same company subsequently used it's electronic device as a trojan horse to secure it's position in a media war, thus crushing a lower priced, and equally innovative competitor, again to ensure it's monopolistic pricing and stranglehold on that industry.

Now I'm sure you may try to marginalize this by saying I'm bitter about the Dreamcast or HD-DVD, but in fact I'm not, just trying to show you that if you hate MS for what it does, AND you were true to yourself, youd have to hate Sony as well for doing the exact same things...

this pretty much backs up all those old posts about how ms didn't really care about selling games as much as it cared about taking down sony. or maybe i am reading into it too much?

MS is a succesful company.  A company main function be it Sony, Ninetendo, or MS is to make MONEY!! They are trying to beat out their competation in multiple ways! Ms is doing just fine and making a ton of money.  You do make some good points but there are plenty of people who like the ZUne of the Ipod everyone is trying to do better than there compatation.  WHy is MS always singled out.

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY08/earn_rel_q4_08.mspx

Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $15.84 billion for the fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30, 2008, an 18% increase over the same period of the prior year. Operating income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.68 billion and $0.46, representing growth of 42% and 48%, respectively, over the same period of the prior year.

Just for the record I am not an MS fan but people need to realzie they are a company out for themselves but all companies are even APPLE

^^
You're right, but it's just this, a company must try to be profitable, and, if big enough, to be an important player or even a leader in the markets it competes in. Trying to become much more than a leader, a monopolist, and behaving up to the boundaries of legality (and sometimes out of them, MS has been sentenced several times) to reach this goal is quite different from simply competing and make profits, to be benevolent and trying not to think too bad, it looks at least paranoid. Once the real JR Ewing, interviewed, said that if he behaved like the "Dallas" fictional one, he wouldn't have been able to do business with anybody else anymore, both partners and competitors would have ganged together to kick him out of business.