Microsoft, Gays, and the Brouhaha

John at AmericaBlog has pretty much led the way in reporting on this topic, which relates to how Microsoft reportedly backed away from supporting legislation that would have made it harder to act with bias against homosexuals. I'm much more disturbed by reports that Microsoft is paying Ralph Reed's group $20K a month for no discernable reason. Absent such a reason, one assumes it's political blackmail demanded by Reed to the tune of nearly a quarter million per year. Read this piece on the front page of the business section of the Washington Post for more details.

As I've said here, I've been associated with Microsoft both directly (as a contractor) and indirectly (in a variety of ways) since the late 1980s. My association with them now is fairly limited (I am no longer a contractor, for example, but I have a book that was published by them last year).

During the time I actively worked for their benefit, probably about 15% of my team (all non-employees) happened to be gay. The limited discrimination I witnessed within the group was never from Microsoft but from a few members of the team who didn't happen to like some of the gays and used their sexual orientation as an excuse to demean them in comments to other team members. Whenever I happened to hear this subject raised when we were around our MS reps, the MS reps either stopped it cold or simply got the topic back to actual work and not gossip.

Elsewhere in my dealings with MS, I've never seen the issue of sexual orientation come up. I knew occasionally from personal statements made by some of the people at MS that they were gay and that according to them, this presented no problem with their employment at Microsoft, but otherwise, it was a non-issue. I've always been rather pleased about that because I haven't always worked with companies who were so accepting.

So I'm a bit stymied by this whole mess. Stymied enough that I don't feel like I have much to add beyond what I've said here.

When this whole thing first burst onto the scene last week, I assumed that both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were out of the loop on what others within the company were doing. Bill might be a Republican, but he's a lover of science, engineering and profitability first and foremost, in my experience. I don't see Bill coddling somebody like Reed. In fact, Microsoft used to have a completely hands-off policy in politics and lobbying. That changed, I believe, during one of the anti-trust cases, and I was sorry it did. I used to enjoy that Microsoft refused to play the games many corporations did in this regard. But I won't pretend to say I know the ins and outs of all of this because it's separate from my work with them which has been technical and/or online community or publishing in nature.

But here's the thing. I see folks say, "fuck this, I'll buy a Mac!" Really? Because probably one of the few reasons Apple is still around is because Microsoft gave them a financial bail-out several years ago. The best-selling Mac software includes many Microsoft products.

There's also the "fuck this, I'll go Linux and open source" but great purity isn't found in this avenue either, in my humble experience. Wherever you have humans, you have politicking and agendas and sadly, some corruption of pure ideals.

So what's the answer? Well, I daresay Microsoft isn't going to be easily touched by simple acts of rebellion (they're slightly large, if you hadn't noticed). But I also think most of us thinking folks are much more likely to buy their products than the people who think science and computers are a crime against God. So if thinking people (say, even just a few million of them) who do not like Mr. Reed's antics contacted Microsoft by letter, I suspect they might at least analyze the situation.

In my experience, Microsoft simply isn't the evil empire it's often portrayed to be. I don't like everything they do, but they're an intelligent company that is usually pretty damned smart about their key markets and their consumers. They aren't a Diebold or an Enron who have an overriding agenda beyond simple business. So I think they have to be approached as an intelligent company by intelligent consumers who are not happy with this development.