Interesting point of view MP.
Why I don't like Microsoft:
Lack of innovation - Microsoft has yet to come up with anything new, every one of their products is bought, borrowed or stolen from someone else.
Lock in - Microsoft's products don't interoperate with other products so people have to keep using thier products, "I can't change to staroffice because some of my word files won't open in it"
Lack of security in Windows - the default configureation in Windows XP is horrible, it is set up as an administrator account.
Aggressive competition - I could go on a lot here but here's one example:
MS decided they'd get rid of netscape and take over the Internet, so they decided to bundle their crappy web browser Internet Explorer (which the got form Mosaic form National Center for Supercomputing) with Windows. This did the trick alright who uses Netscape these days?
So if Microsoft's bad why won't people switch?
Because of the lock in factor I described earlier on - It's a vicious circle the following statements sum this up:
Hardware manufacturers and software developers support Windows because it's the most popular system.
They won't support Linux for example because not enough people use it to make it worth their trouble.
People are put off Linux because it lacks industry support i.e. because manufactures don't write drivers for it so some printers (and other hardware) won't work with in Linux, also software developers won't develop for it so they can't play the latest games.
In short, Linux isn't popular enough for manufactuters and software developers to support it so but they won't untill it has a high enough userbase but it won't achieve that until the industry supports it.
However the situation is improving, there are Linux equivalents for most Windows software, for example OpenOffice instead of MS Office, the gimp instead of Adobe photoshop and most of these are free too and Linux hackers have written drivers for most Windows only hardware also some companies now write Linux software and drivers.
This situation helps keep Windows at number 1, the same thing stops BSD, or BeOS from becomming big, in short the qulity of the OS doesn't deturmine the user base.
What's so bad about a monopoly?
Apart from high prices and other bussiness being squashed, a monopoly restricts people's choices and lowers the quality of the products. Look at all of the ultra cheap high quality computer hardware we have to choose from, this it because there is competition between vendors. Now look at the operating system, we're stuck with MS Windows - an overpriced and very featureless and boring system to say the least.
Am I jealous of Bill Gates?
No!
There are more important things in life than money, more money means more responsibility and more to worry about, all I want from life is an interesting job, a good marriage and a happy family.
Some very interesting links:
Just say no to Microsoft
Microsoft Wikipedia page
My favourite anti MS site
Another good page
A very interesting article
