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Thanks for the reasons, they are valid ones and we should all consider them.
However until there really are competitors what are we, people who want to get our jobs done, supposed to do? Suffer with inferior tools but be proud that we are not using the spawn of an unethical company?
For instance I won't buy Nike anymore after all that came out about them. However there are equally good alternatives, so it is not hard to swap.
So we are in a tough area. We can continue to buy and use MS products, so prolonging their dominance and giving them ammo to continue being unethical, or we can try alternatives.
What do you do, anonymous? 
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Anonymous wrote:
Microsoft products are good, but we lack something to compare them against, and that's what is actually wrong with them.
Actually no. MS has introduced CRM software a couple of months ago. CRM they have bought from somewhere (I can't remember who at the mo). This directly competes with Siebel, SAP, BOBJ, etc.
And when you compare features, etc. that's useless and clueless because what counts is customer penetration, and those I mention have all the market share, MS has none.
This means most of the time competition is not matter of technical sh*t.
MS quote (http://www.microsoft.com/ddk) : As of September 30, 2002, the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 DDK, the Microsoft Windows 98 DDK, and the Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 DDK will no longer be available for purchase or download on this site. Support for development will ship at the same time as the Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) release.
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Well, there's probably no point in replying to this now, but for the record -
Of the operating systems i've used, the first, second, fifth and sixth have been from MS. The second, third, fourth, and eighth programming environments i've used were as well. Even though i'm relatively young, MS has still been part of my computing experience for a rather long time.
And until very recently they've done little but disappoint me.
DOS, Win3.1, Win9x all were *bad* operating systems. DOS at least was minimal enough that it didn't get in the way of the better software, but both Win3.1 and Win9x tainted everything they touched. Nothing i've used before or since has come close to the frustration i experienced using Win9x. Win2k and up have been very good, IMHO, but the memory lives on.
Until quite recently, i could not afford to purchase Visual Studio, and so my experiences with Microsoft languages were dominated by variations on BASIC. There is really nothing i can say that will make that any worse. The memory still scars me.
Worse yet, prior to Win2k, there *were* better operating systems. I lived happily with OS/2, and then Linux. The thought that if MS had just adopted one of these (though i'll admit in the case of OS/2 it's not entirely their fault) we could have skipped five painful years of Win9x (hah! as though it were gone now...  ) haunts me.
So my answer is, although there are always many little reasons not to like a company or it's products, i don't have any huge blanket reason not to use MS software - which is why i currently *am* using MS software to make a living. But I have no love for the company, and though logically i should consider them in the same class as many others, the thought of MS software still fills me with a greater feeling of disgust.
---------------- Shog9 ----------------
------- Drink Coca-Cola -------
---- Use SciTE ----
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i dislike them because they use their enormous weight to push other people out of the market. Netscape is the obvious example, but there are others.
yes, i realize that capitalism is the best thing in the world, ever.
-c
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
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This is a true thing but one must have a humanitarian side. I chose to express my capitalistic side personally. 
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Paul Watson wrote:
So anyway, can everyone please list why they feel they shouldn't be using MS products? Are there valid reasons which do not apply to other companies?
Most people look at it backwards.
I think you should be asking what can MS/windows do that other products/companies can't.
Lets say you needed a toaster and you were looking at two different options, one was free and the other one cost $50. Wouldn't you ask yourself if the one that cost you some of your hard earned money was worth paying for? Or would you feel compelled to pay for that one unless someone else could talk you into the free one? Personally I would look at what the free one had to offer and then make sure that the other one could load the toast into itself without my assistance before I forked over $50.
So this brings up a question. What can you do on your windows box that I can't do on my linux box?
-Jack
If things are as bad as they can be, you can be sure there'll be a brighter tomarrow.
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As a user, I think I'll probably always use Microsoft software. As a programmer, I think I'd have little trouble moving to a non-M$ environment in C++.
This question seems a little odd to me.
Christian
Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002
Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
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This reminds me of some marketing research stats we got fed at Symantec. Some firm asked people two quesions regarding satisfaction: 1) Do you think you will use Company ABC's software in the future? and 2) Would you recommend Company ABC's software to your friends? Microsoft always scored 100% on #1, because can you really say you'll never use anything from MS again?
And yes I know us computer geeks can go w/o MS if we want. This was research done with lots of users from the general [non-geek] public.
--Mike--
Just released - RightClick-Encrypt v1.4 - Adds fast & easy file encryption to Explorer
My really out-of-date homepage
Sonork-100.19012 Acid_Helm
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