you're just bitter

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You're just bitter.

I hear this once in a while when I make fun of Microsoft, invariably from people still employed there. It's a curious charge. Why on Earth would I be bitter toward the company that shoveled piles and piles of cash my way? I'm actually pretty grateful. And I have overwhelmingly fond memories of my time there, particularly of the '90s.

I bailed not out of bitterness but because the company changed out from under me. When I started, I'd hear colleagues talk about making the stock go up. Every single day. By the time I left, that ethic was a distant memory. Quaint, even. I saw control shifting to dullards who think that meetings and slidedecks are deliverables and who, gallingly, never think in terms of returning the company's financial investment in them. Of being more benefit than cost. I had no respect for the new guard, so it was hard to imagine that they would continue to respect me.

It was someone else's time. So I left for a better fit.

Much as I watched with alarm as Microsoft took three years to release their iPhone clone, I now watch from afar as they impotently glom on to the pop culture flavor of the month. Their struggles make me feel not bitter, but embarrassed. And more than a little sad. It's the same feeling I got when I visited my childhood home and saw that the trees I'd once climbed were cut down. Both places are less, now.

And I reserve the right to mock the people who wrecked my childhood home. Watching Jesse Pinkman turn on X-Boxes worldwide? That crap is just funny.