There is a story in the Bible (whether you honor the Bible or not, the story is still there), about a king who saw the wife of another man and was taken with her. Now this king already had a few wives of his own, and most likely could have had more. But the woman he saw, even though he was told by his servants that she was another man's wife (that man's only wife), he still seduced her. When the woman became pregnant, the king tried to bring the man and his wife together, to make it seem she was pregnant by her husband, but since the husband was a warrior (and a war was going on), he didn't feel comfortable spending time with his wife while his comrades slept in tents in the fields. So the king put the man in a situation in which he knew he'd be killed.

Why am I telling Bible stories? Because something Microsoft has done reminded me of that story. Here's mighty Microsoft, producer of some of the most-used (and most expensive) software on the market, producer of the most popular input devices, producer of the XBox, not to mention the services they sell, raking in billions in revenues, of which I'm sure a hefty amount is profit. There is this other little company, that makes just one product, a program that basically offloads some TCP functions to the network adapter to improve CPU performance. Microsoft apparently talked to this company about this product a little while ago, and pretended to be only mildly interested. Then, a time later, they introduced the technology, which they called "Chimney". The other company offered to license the technology to Microsoft, but they basically said, "uuuuh, Nah, that's OK."
So now, Microsoft is trying to implement the technology in yet another product, but a judge has blocked it, pending court proceedings.
My question is, why does Microsoft pick on this company? Don't they have enough, and if they want this technology, can't they pay for it? Like the king who wasn't satisfied with the abundance he had and took what little the man had, Microsoft, not satisfied with it's empire, wants to take the bread and butter of this company.
I know Michael Douglas' character in the movie "Wall Street" asserted that "greed is good", but it aint so. Greed stinks!
If I stop using ALL Microsoft products, I'm sure it would have no noticeable impact on their operations (it would be impractical anyway), but when they do things like this, it makes me wish I could.