<snip> > Yes, but I think a lot of people enjoy thinking Microsoft is out to get > them:) <snip> Not exactly. I will give credit where credit is due. I like Word and use it daily. I wished for something like this in the seventies and in some ways - it is the fulfillment of my dreams of what a word processing program should be. When Microsoft competes by offering product that attracts customers by offering features and performance I am a supporter. When IBM used to rule the roost, and now Microsoft, the dominant player has an overwhelming say in how things work. This in itself is not a bad thing. The root of my problem is that these companies have made many decisions that were very good for the company, but were not very good for the customers. . I have been writing programs using Microsoft products from the CM/P days. I have also used competitors products and have been able to compare the relative merits of related products. I have had considerable time to think about this as I have fought with some of the bone headed things that Microsoft has done. I could give many examples. I am sure that most of the code wonks on the list can also provide similar examples. These problem seem to fall into two classes. 1) I can *almost* forgive rushing poorly thought out or incomplete products into users hands. I understand the dynamics of software production. This means that, like it or not, I am spending time and money to support these decisions. This is particularly painful when I find myself trying to explain the problems to paying customers. Several have asked "You have to be full of crap - how can a big company like Microsoft ship something like that" and I try to explaining that this just how things work. Some of these mistakes are very asymmetrical. There is a multiplication effect here; they make a decision to skip testing or release a known shoddy product and it has to be cured on millions of computers. Because of the scope of the installed base the bug (and its workaround) ends up becoming a permanent feature on the landscape. 2) What is harder is when my programs are breaking because interface problems inside Microsoft code. I feel like a conspiracy nut explaining that some problem was introduced to break competitors code. It sounds childish when I tell someone why are paying for man-days of labor for this reason. What is telling is that when you do contact Microsoft techs, they point you away from documented interfaces to undocumented one that *do* work. I have been told by former Microsofties that key libraries and API were deliberately obstificated to make things difficult for competitors. The overall pattern is that Microsoft has made bad technical decisions based of what is good for Microsoft, not what is good for the computer community and customers. Now they are making decisions that will, by default, change the computing substrate that Linux runs on. Plainly put; Microsoft is going to "solve" it's security problems by forcing the entire computing community to participate in their vision of secure computing. Given the track record - I don't trust Microsoft to do the right thing. Mark Browne _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list