Wealth & Money Quote by Linus Torvalds

A backhanded compliment disguised as a shrug, Torvalds frames Microsoft as a company that can monetize almost anything, just not excellence. The genius is in the asymmetry: “making money” is treated as a repeatable industrial process, while “making good operating systems” is positioned as craft - harder, messier, and, in his telling, neglected. That contrast needles Microsoft where it hurts most in developer culture: legitimacy. Profit is not proof of quality; it’s proof of distribution, lock-in, timing, and leverage.

The “in my opinion” opener is classic Torvalds: a rhetorical seatbelt that doesn’t actually slow the punch. It pretends to be casual while signaling a hard-earned verdict from someone who built Linux into the defining counter-myth to Windows: open, modular, community-driven, and suspicious of corporate control. The subtext is that Microsoft’s dominance comes less from technical superiority than from business tactics - licensing, bundling, and default status - a critique that mattered even more in the era when Windows was the unavoidable workplace OS and “choice” often meant “compatibility.”

Calling him a “businessman” misses the charge. Torvalds is a technologist with a populist streak for engineers, and the line plays to that audience’s resentment: being forced to live inside tools chosen by procurement rather than merit. It’s not just a jab at Windows’ past flaws; it’s a warning about incentives. When profit is the KPI, “good enough” ships, and users inherit the compromises.