I note that the reference to the Yankee Group's study carefully states that no M$ money was received for that particular study. I believe the Yankee Group receives other funds from Redmond.

I found Exhibit 1 in the Yankee Group study to be very interesting. None of the "pie slices" represented a move from Unix/Linux servers to Microsoft. If I were Microsoft, I'd be worried.

As for the desktop, a few years ago I never would have thought that I would leave the Windows world. Now, 90% of my at-home work is done on Linux. Virus/security issues are the reason.

the fact that M$ doesn't seem to get.....

'get the facts' asks the wrong questions. microsoft asks 'that can linux do that we can't?'

well the answer to that is obvious... since M$ is a monopoly... and if you have software you want to put out there... you almost *have* to make it work on windows to do anything with it.. in turn it means that almost anything you want to do.. there's probably windows compatible software out there that *can* do it. (how well it can do it is a different topic...) but... this is not really the question or the problem that needs to be addressed if we are trying to 'get the facts'

so... what is the problem? what's the questions that M$ should be asking?

'what does microsoft do that makes our customers *not* want to use our software?'

the answers are....

-we don't want IE... it's a virus magnet. we want to be able to use whatever we want to use to surf the net and want M$ not to try and'handicap' it from working on there software properly.

-we don't want window's mediaplayer intergrated. we don't want to just 'hide it' we don't want it. we want to be able to use whatever software we want to play media and we want you not to 'handicap it.'
p.s. i have absolutely no interest in M$'s copyright protection software being embedded into longhorn version of mediaplayer. it's none of your business what i do with the CD's i own... if i make copies of them for myself or friends and family. i am opposed to the RIAA and read (and support) downhillbattle.org and EFF.org.

(to be continued...)

(continued...)

-if i pay good money for a piece of software.... why am i not aloud to look at all the files in that piece of software? what with these 'hidden' files? i own it. i bought it. why am i restricted by it?

-nobody trusts you. you pay for fake studies. you go out of your way to put the little guy out of business. you pull underhanded stunts.

i could go on and on... and i realize that some of my opinions on M$ products may not be shared by others.. but what i really thinks needs to be pointed out here is a level of customer service and silliness on the part of microsoft.

(continued...)
if M$ did an online study... asking people questions about what they want in the newest version of windows... i don't think we'd come up with anything that even closely resembles lornhorn. at the same time much of what microsoft has taken to make windows is modified free software (BSD) and stuff they've bought (or stoled..) from other companies. M$ has made there money off of things that every computer needs- (an OS... word processing...) and the real problem is the free alternatives have advanced enough.....

...to be on a level playing field with M$. microsoft claims that free software will erode the foundations
of the market... when all there really saying is that someday free software will erode *them.* i'm sure there will be plenty of software companies makeing lots of money of off software in the future. given M$ current attitude towards there customers and the market place the only rel question is...
will microsoft be one of them?

Why do I see the trend of linux users becoming carbon copies of mac users. When I was first introduced to linux, the community was about choice. Now it seems to taken a turn to the ol' Bill Gates is the Anti-Christ. This is a tired ol' Mac user complaint that need not gain any new voices. Windows is a good OS. The reason it has problems is because of its popularity. Spyware and Virii are the reason I made the switch to the Penguin. But honestly if those two didn't exist on MS products, I'd still be using XP.

just my 2 cents

I'm a computer science student, and I switched to Linux, even though it was much harder to do back there in '99. I did, because Linux has so much more to offer to students in acquiring knowledge, job skills, programming experience, and a great bunch of tools.

Now Linux is my only OS for work, but I could consider FreeBSD, too. And Windows/DOS is only my gaming console, especially for older games (ye good olde days, you know).

Frankly I'm hating M$'s attitude, the shoddy quality of its products: They are nearly all are crappy, full of bugs, badly designed and overprized: IIS, IE (the price is contained in the OS), Windows, Media Player (same as IE), ActiveScript, etc.

It is a great relief today, now that so many FOSS software has reached maturity, to be on the free software side. Frankly, I have a fully-featured office (OO.org), CD/DVD burning (k3b), media player (xine/mplayer), audio player (XMMS), Browser (Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror), Email (Thunderbird, Evolution, Mozilla), etc., etc. I have apps galore, and every month some bigshot company starts or finishes porting new products to Linux, or even open-sourcing it. I have all the server apps at my disposal. I simply can make real use of my computer, instead of having some dumbed-down Windows with no apps, where I spend a lot of the money on the OS I could really use for other stuff (like specialist apps like VMWare etc.).

M$ sucks. It's as plain simple as that. Just because they have a stranglehold on a lot of corporate IT doesn't scare me into buying their crap. If there were clever console games (there aren't), there would be finally no M$ in my life.