I like MS products, I use Office, Visio and then other 3rd party products like Photoshop, Acrobat and some CAD/CAM tools... I've tried Linux offerings and while similar, to be honest, the MS stuff is just more polished and better... What I have a problem with is everytime MS see's fresh meat -- Like Netscape, or Java, or countless other superb, ahead of their time products --- Microsoft has to come in and steam roller the competition, add it integrated (supposedly) into Windows and then crush the 3rd party... now I'm all for competition and Free Market, that is all well and good... however, MS is spread too far, too wide and has too many of its own housekeeping and debugging issue's to deal with on its already top heavy line of products. They need to correct their own products before going out to assimilate and dominate other products and hurt competition. I give Windows credit --- yes, Mac's are better in so many ways, but you have to think -- well - Apple's and Oranges, except Apple's are in fact Apple's, the hardware is tightly controlled to a very narrow set of hardware models, which is a great idea. PC's on the other hand --- the "Oranges" --- well its more like a fruit smoothie... millions upon millions of possible variants of firmware, chipsets, memory, controller cards, video cards, network cards, sound cards, game cards, USB cards, Firewire Cards, on and on and on... Windows runs on ALL of that... now yes, someone will chime in "Well so can Linux too..." Geez, Linux run's on just about anything other there - it is a truly incredible OS, hands down --- but it is not as user friendly as Windows of Mac OSX, it is still a more tech-savvy based OS, great for servers and embedded devices for its speed, resilience and stability, on the desktop front - it is making monumental steps forward, but it's not there and while Open Office is great- MS office is still more polished and better, while Gimp is good, Photoshop is far superior --- yes you could run Wine and VMware - but again, but to being tech-savvy to do... Bottom line, we've all had our frustrating shares of Blue Screens, device drivers that just don't want to load or cooperate, MS blindly releasing an OS "they" wanted, but no one else did = VISTA (spit on it - tooey!!!) but they've done some good, great and not so great things and despite all of what they do wrong, they still manage to do the right things in the right places. Still like Mac's better though :-) Curt Dave McGuire wrote:

My point is that people the constantly bash Microsoft are like 3rd graders that keep telling the same damn knock knock joke all day. I have no further comments. -- Will

At 11:17 AM -0400 5/22/09, William Donzelli wrote: I think it's a question of levels of issues. I for one complain about problems with Mac OS X, there are some design decisions that are just plain stupid. As for VMS, the complaints there exist as well, but you're less likely to see them unless you're hanging out in comp.os.vms. In spite of all the problems with these other OS's (sorry I'm not conversant in the IBM OS's), they're a walk in the park compared to trying to administer Windows. How about incredible drain on business resources due to all of the patches that are required for Microsoft products. Anymore that is my chief complaint against Windows. Heaven help you if a "Critical" Security patch comes down the stream. Then people will likely loose their weekend to the latest My hatred of Microsoft began when I bought Visual Basic V1, while I considered it to be a great product, if failed to deliver the OS/2 version advertised on the box and in the manual. Windows 95 convinced me to buy a Mac. I still don't like Microsoft, but I do like their development tools. SQL Studio, Visual Studio and .NET all rock, and I'm spending a disturbing amount of time working with them now. At least with Visual Studio and .NET I can still target both Linux and Win2k3 (the two platforms I need to target for work). I just wish HP would get their act together and port Mono to VMS. Sadly the MS bashing is what caused Kai's departure from this list. One has to wonder what resources are on this list that we don't know about due to listmembers hostility towards certain companies. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |