Withdrawing from Microsoft.....

I saw this discussion when you first started it but didn't really know what to say so I just shut my mouth for the meantime. Then a few days later my boyfriend and I watched "Antitrust" movie and I was saying to my boyfriend that one of the guy looked like Bill Gates. When I searched for reviews it actually was a satirical movie aimed at Bill Gates. Have you seen it yet? It really is the perfect match for this discussion.

I doubt whoever buys yahoo affects anything down at our level, they are buying it because it will bring profit to them but how, by doing the work it has always done. So for me it makes no difference at all, I see this happen all the time in the corporate world and it means nothing done at my end.

It's actually quite a story how Microsoft acquired DOS. The people who actually wrote the operating system (Digital Research) occasionally worked with Bill Gates, and he actually tried to do them a huge favor by getting them in touch with IBM to arrange a meeting, advising them to "be courteous." But there were apparently some demands IBM was making that made these people upset, so there was no deal. Gates wasn't happy with this outcome, so he started to move forward with a deal of his own. When Digital Research got wind of it, they threatened to sue IBM, who offered to market both versions of the (same) operating system, to which they agreed. When the PC hit the stores, there were the two versions: CP/M selling for an outrageous $240, and MS DOS for $40. Consumers went with the cheaper one. Digital Research had been had. The second story is about the GUI. Microsoft may have ripped this off of Apple, but it was initially Steve Jobs himself who ripped it off of Xerox. It's just that way. Business is a cutthroat arena, and always has been. Until someone gets a patent, possession is nine tenths of the law. The people who lost the IBM deal to Bill Gates respect him to this day as a "smart, ruthless business man." The saddest part of the story is that the man who actually did most of the programming is no longer with us. This isn't reason enough for me to emigrate from Windows. In fact, nothing else supports what I need to do. With all the different projects I have done, a software-based need could arise anytime. Windows is the only platform that can facilitate these needs. Second, I have over 80 portable applications (including my e-mail client) on a flashdrive. Neither Linux nor the Mac have stable enough USB support; even a USB mouse will stop responding in Linux. And I'm not just talking about one distro; it's in the Linux kernel itself. In addition, no single distro will work on all chipsets, or get online with all networking hardware. Choosing a distro doesn't always involve choosing the one you like the best; you're also limited to what will actually run on your machine. Only a few distros will run on my AMD64 laptop, and the popular Ubuntu isn't one of them. I have twelve different distros, and also a copy of Sun's Solaris operating system. Only three Linux distros worked on my laptop. Of those three, only PCLinuxOS was able to recognize my WiFi chip, yet even after it had been configured and joined the network, Web pages still would not load in the browser. If that's not confusing enough, none of the distros that work on my laptop will run on my Celeron desktop unit! And also, Linux limits me to a printer without a scanner. No distro I've ever tried supports the flatbed on my HP PSC unit. Linux just doesn't have enough third-party support. It's bad enough that it was designed for servers, and Torvalds could care less whether the existing USB drivers can handle continuous use. It's far worse that the open source community is so divided in itself; there are over 300 distros, so many that it's impossible for OEMs all to pick the same one. Until this happens, anyone who wants to use Linux is forced to do largely without in order to accommodate the operating system. And that is just outrageous; the operating system was designed to store drivers so applications wouldn't have to be confined to specific hardware, and to interface with the user so we didn't all have to learn typed commands. In short, the operating system is supposed to accommodate us. Unfortunately if you use Linux, that's not the case. And if you use it regularly, you're going to have to open the terminal sooner or later. There are too many things you can't install any other way, DVD CSS support being just one. Microsoft is the de facto standard, the necessary evil, if you will. Believe me when I say you stand to lose a whole lot more with the loss of Windows than Microsoft does with the loss of you. When I choose an operating system, I go with what can facilitate my needs. Same is the case with search engines. This is a case-by-case basis, not a choice of whose business ethics I respect the most. You said it yourself; leadership changes like the weather.