Hall Stevenson wrote: > The best part is, many people who bash > Microsoft products have never used them, or at least not > recently. I'm by no means defending their stuff (I'm using MS > Outlook Express to send this, by the way, no gurus need to > examine the mail headers to "expose" me). It's simply > narrow-mindedness...
No, not just narrow-mindedness. It's a number of things. (And I have used Microsoft products recently -- I was an Outlook Express user from 1997 until just a few months ago, and I still use a number of MS products daily because my regular job is as a Win32 C++ developer.) The attitude towards Microsoft products that one finds around here (and among Linux devotees generally, I imagine) comes from a few sources: - A dislike of software that flaunts or fails to correctly implement standards. The discussion today about OE's MIME handling is one example. - A dislike of programs that are insufficiently customizable or extensible. Microsoft programs generally do one thing one way, and give you a handful of minor user options like whether to automatically check spelling or not. They generally don't allow you to use your own text editor (unless you go the cumbersome route of editing text elsewhere and then cutting-and-pasting it into the MS app, which is inconvenient), nor do they implement very good editors themselves. - A dislike of programs that don't allow you to fix any of the above problems, or even find out what the underlying problem is, because they're closed-source. - A dislike of Microsoft as a corporation, based on its strong-arm monopoly tactics (which are no longer in dispute -- the appeals court may have rejected Jackson's breakup remedy, but they upheld his findings) and misuse of common words such as "innovation" and "consumer benefit" to mean things quite different from what they are normally understood to mean. To dismiss all this as "narrow-mindedness" is simply incorrect. Craig
