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Personally, M$ doesn't need to compete as far as media players (software such as WMP, VLC, foobar2000), is because they have about 20 or 30 third party media players available.

When I first really started listening to music on my PC about a year ago, I started with iTunes, which was great for me as a beginner, but then I got fed up with it sucking up between 50 and 70 mbs of RAM, not to mention even with the "Keep my folder organized" option disabled, it would still seem to take all my nicely organized directories of "top level/artist/album" and I end up with about 3 different directories for 1 (one) artist... what a pain in the ass...

After my initial encounter with iTunes I went to Winamp, which worked ok for a month or 2, by which time I had loaded it with enough plugins it was permanently broken - even after a complete removal of the plugins and Winamp with a reinstall of the player, it still wouldn't work. Oh ya, did I mention I ended up removing more than 80% of Winamps default plugins since they were useless to me?

At this point I went to foobar2000 - if you don't want it to do something, it doesn't do it, find the plugins/extensions you want, load em up, change the UI, etc and it loads ONLY the ones you have. The UI uses the "TAGZ" language (if thats what you call it) - the same that Winamp uses, except about 5x more extensively and provides documentation on most if not all of the commands - in other words, if you want something to say "Songs" instead of "Playlists" you can change it yourself. Basically its everything I could want - customized the hell out of the interface (well, ok it is missing the ability to lose window chrome and a skinnable toolbar, and no mini-mode is a downer, but hey - rainmeter widgets answer that for me) and it doesn't try to reorginize my stuff so that I can micromanage that myself like I want to.

Rainlender. Small, compact, configurable, and has some synchronization stuff, too.

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Personally I use Rainlendar. It looks cool, has a light footprint, and just plain works. It's Windows-only, though =\


-Ares

I use a program called Rainlender that, while perhaps not being as fully supported or fully featured as Sunbird or whatever, it's nice, small and does what I need it to do.

A wonderful little calender / to-do list desktop application is available at:

http://www.ipi.fi/~rainy

It has highly customizable skinning with tons available already. Integration with different Outlook versions. Simple interface, shortcut commands. Week-numbering, which is important in some countries. Easy to erase to-do items, and calender event alerting. Did I mention a fully customizable look for the floating windows. Version 0.19.3 is out now, go get it.

- A happy user, BBLean and Rainlendar, keeps my desktop clean and me on time.

Anyone else here use Rainlendar?
I find its a VERY nice piece of software, even if it doesn't have all the fancy contacts/synching/whatever features of other calendars. Nope, its pretty much just stick notes on the days, and glance at your ToDo list. Nothing professional, but for me it works really well.
No, its not perfect... but hey, it IS open source, so you could mod it yourself if you wanted! :)

I'd reccomend it to anyone whos at that awkward stage between "No calendar" and "Bloated calendar". Heck, maybe even if you're already using a bloated calendar and just want something simple. Give it a whirl, it cant hurt.

Disclaimer: I don't work for, nor am I associated with Rainlendar. For the record, I use iCal with my YzDock (OH NO APPLE'S GONNA SUE ME) dock.