I learned an interesting thing in school one time (amazing, isn't it?):  My international relations professor said that everyone hates number one.  He used the argument in reference to every country on earth hating America.  His thought was that the reason everyone hates our country and our leaders and our foreign policy and our "westernism" is because we're number one.  We're in first place.  We're the "best" country in the world.  People didn't hate us 50 years ago, and that's because countries like England and France were number one. 

Whether or not this is true, it makes some amount of sense.  And here are three more examples: 

1.  Microsoft.  People hate Microsoft.  Even though 99.7% (I know this is wrong) of the world's computers send emails through Microsoft mail servers using Microsoft Outlook and run on Microsoft Windows, people hate Microsoft.  They complain about having no other choice and being screwed by a big corporate monopoly.  But I think another part of that hatred is because Microsoft is on top.  They're huge.  They're unbeatable.  They make usable and popular products.  And we hate them for that. 

2.  Google.  A year ago, people couldn't stop praising Google.  They offer great services and make reliable products that do amazing things.  But then people started realizing that Google was number one.  And that's when the hatred started.  I just read an article about the top 25 reasons to hate Google.  Sure these are valid reasons, but why don't these people just use a different service?  Go back to Yahoo or Ask Jeeves.  Or maybe it's just easier to hate number one. 

3.  WordPress.  A lot of people probably don't even know what WordPress is.  But for the people in the web developing/publishing world, WordPress is a free content management system and website back-end.  And it's also a blog host.  WordPress.org (the software) and WordPress.com (the host) are two completely different things, though they involve the same people and most of the same software.  There's a huge community of developers and supporters for WordPress, and it keeps growing everyday.  What I didn't realize until recently was that people really hate WordPress.  Comments posted on Digg show that people think WordPress is unreliable and failure-prone.  Or maybe they hate WordPress because it's gaining ground to becoming number one in the web publishing world. #technology