Microsoft was and is still an abusive monopoly which ripped off society for billions of dollars, caused vast losses to the world economy, and even set back technological progress for all of mankind by a significant amount. You had to buy Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Windows was always a piece of crap. Think of how much this worthless to lousy to dysfunctional OS cost consumers, business and society due to its crappy nature.
You are always hearing that “the system is down” right, whenever you go anywhere? The ATM is down half the time you go there. Call random businesses and 10-20% of them will tell you “the system is down.” I will bet you that that is a Windows system that has crashed at that enterprise. Windows’ endless dysfunction and crashing caused a tremendous amount of damage to the US military who moronically decided to use Windows all through our country’s fighting forces for just about everything. Great. A computer-based military where the system always crashes. I’m sure they’re going to win every war they fight.
Basically, all of humanity was forced to use a glaringly obviously inferior product for all of their computing needs. This inferior product had constant problems which drove a spike through the heart of productivity at the individual, business, nonprofit and government level. All of humanity was using inferior computer systems that barely worked and failed all the time.
All of this time, there were much superior systems out there which could have beaten Windows if they only had a chance. Amiga OS was always one of finest ever developed. BeOS was an outstanding OS, amazingly great. OS/2 was an out of the world OS. All of these OS’s were fantastic at multitasking and even mutithreading. People routinely ran up to 80 applications at a time on OS/2 with little or no slowdown. BeOS was about that good and may have even been faster. But with a monopoly on the desktop where everyone was forced to use Windows, all of these other OS’s died a sad death.
Unix has long ruled at the university and corporate level, and much of the Net runs of Unix. Larger server systems have always run on Unix at the level of the large enterprise, be it government, corporate or nonprofit. But Unix has never really broken in on the desktop where Windows still reigns. Windows is much better now than it was in the Windows 95 era (Remember how horrible that OS was?). I am currently running Windows 7, which is the best Windows I ever run, but it’s still crap. It suffers from unfixable file corruption and sometimes needs a hard reboot or goes down altogether.
Unix on the other hand is virtually uncrashable. It is very hard to take down a Unix system. They are nearly resistant to crashing. File corruption is virtually nonexistent on Unix because of Journaling File Systems and text files instead the idiotic and flawed Registry of Windows. The Registry is so flawed that it can probably never be fixed. As long as the Registry exists, Windows will continue to be slow, hog memory and hard drive, be awful at multitasking, crash your applications, suffer irreparable file corruption, and go down hard and need hard reboots.
Mac OS is an excellent OS now that it runs on a Unix core. Mac OS is almost uncrashable now, and it never or almost never needs to be reinstalled. Plug and Play is as easy as plugging in any electronic device in your house, whereas Windows plug and play has always been horrible, and it still is here at Windows 7.
Windows also harmed the world economy by forcing us to shell out untold billions for OS’s, word processors, browsers, databases, spreadsheets and presentation programs. Microsoft of course leveraged its OS monopoly to create browser, database, spreadsheet and presentation monopolies. All of these products were quite expensive. In the process, many excellent word processors (remember Wordperfect 5.1?), spreadsheets, databases, and presentation products were all destroyed. It didn’t matter how good they were. It didn’t matter if they were better or even vastly better than their Microsoft competitors (Access was always junk) because due to the OS monopoly, none of the competitors in this other software stood a chance.
The truth is that all of this stuff could have been had for free all along. Linux is free and open source, and that is one of the reasons why it is so great. Firefox and Opera are also free now, and Firefox is also open source and has been taken over by Sun. Free online email programs like Gmail have cut significantly into the market share of Outlook Express (always awful – Eudora was so much better) and Outlook.
Open Office, now taken over by Sun, is free and is starting to give Word, Access, Excel and Powerpoint a run for their money. I use Word Writer all the time, and it’s just as good as Word by now. If the world moves to free browsers, OS’s, word processors, chat software (Skype), spreadsheets, databases and presentation software, think of how much money can be saved at the individual, business, nonprofit, education and government level! It will be a great step forward for humanity. There is no way for Microsoft to compete with a free product of course, so we will hopefully begin to slowly destroy this diabolical corporation, one of the worst ones that ever existed.
