http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7487060.stm

Now, look who has written this story.

If you let one say Waitrose write a story about Tesco's market dominance (Tesco is i belive about 8 times the size), you have to be very careful about the quality of the writer, and that if its un-balanced its not just a series of attacks, and carefully worded alligations of fraud.

Fact is there are plenty of areas i find microsoft's business rolls very monopolistic. Mostly its total domminanation of education (at least in the UK). Kids are trained, not taught, so tools like MS Office become the standard. This of course is not unique (Photoshop vrs GIMP). Given the hudge price of an office license for me to do my work on my non-company issue laptop is very anoying.

He attacks someone for asking people not to steal their software. Excuse me?! Since when did ANYONE other than the rights holder get to decide who can use their property. If i thought i wasn't going to get paid for doing my work, i wouldn't do it. There might be someone who wants to do it for free, so let them by all means, the reason they've not doing my job (saving the company i work for a few tonnes) is that either they don't exist, or their not as good. Given that i'm able to demand an above average wage, i'd guess its the latter.

In 1984, when I started the free software movement, I was hardly aware of Gates' letter. But I'd heard similar demands from others, and I had a response: "If your software would keep us divided and helpless, please don't write it. We are better off without it. We will find other ways to use our computers, and preserve our freedom."
Its there.

Fact of the matter, for what we do its simply not as good. Granted we're a cash rich firm, but thats hardly un-usual. When buying a couple of highly specced app servers, the £5k a pop cost quickly negates a software license fee. Given that (and i might have to get into a flame war here) NT is BETTER than linux (threading, its much much easyer to write a faster multithread app because you can communicate between threads far faster) for what we do. We're in no way alone.

Yes there are factors that keep people locked into windows, but he completely misses them.

#1 people are familiar with it. Change costs, we're seeing a fair few companies planning to switch to a cheeper open source OS rather than Vista. But i've plenty of anacdotal evidence from friends firms that these plans got kicked in the balls because Open Office isn't liked because it lacks <insert feature that probably exists, but receptionist couldn't find>.

#2 its piss easy to use. Yes the latest Ubuntu is damn easy to install, but setting up a simple small business network of 10 PCs is still a lot harder. Hardware support is often a major ordeal, and maintaining driver updates hellish (the firm i previously worked for only had ONE build of linux machine just for that reason).

He then goes onto standards. Oh how i hate it when people do this, i can't even decide on a standardised logging platform for the 15 tiny little business apps i have to make, normally because with a new little task that requires its own app, i end up with some kind of situation i couldn't of forseen 3 months ago.

Look at something people have been trying to standardise for a while, HTML rendering. Ignoring MS's apathey towards IE (ie, we had no compittion, who needs a team to maintain the codebase) people like Opera and the Motzilla foundation can't even agree.

HTML is a hell of a lot simpler than an office document.

Should we loose really rather useful features like OLE for the sake of standardisation?

None of these down sides are mentioned. It just makes me furious that we get such biased, clearly with a vested intrest OPION as news on something thats uniquely funded like the beeb. Granted they had the whole interview with gates as he steps down, but he didn't spend the time making alligations of ilegal/morally wrong doings by the compitetion.