There are places where using open standards is a requirement, and Microsoft is trying to get in by creating their own 'standard' and buying voters to approve it as an ISO standard. To avoid this cheating, open standards adopters could add a rule that says: a truly open standard is one that has at least two different implementations (from distinct vendors). This principle rules out 'standards' that are not really open.
One of the important principles in GUI design is that your user interface must always be responsive and never hang. In practice this means you have to make sure that any data processing is always outside of the GUI thread. Unfortunately many applications still do not do this. I sometimes wonder if the developers of such an application actually use their own program. Don't they get annoyed when they see the program hang? Or maybe they're just too lazy to fix the problem.
Windows is cheaper than the free OS. That makes sense. Others already explained why this is, but in my opinion it doesn't matter that much.
To me the primary advantage is that you can now buy a PC without paying Microsoft tax.
Maybe they really are desperate. Users want security, but Microsoft can't change too much in the OS without breaking compatibility with apps that were written for older versions of their OS. So what were they going to do? Asking the user for confirmation when doing a potential 'dangerous' operation was the easiest thing to implement for them.
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There are places where using open standards is a requirement, and Microsoft is trying to get in by creating their own 'standard' and buying voters to approve it as an ISO standard. To avoid this cheating, open standards adopters could add a rule that says: a truly open standard is one that has at least two different implementations (from distinct vendors). This principle rules out 'standards' that are not really open.
One of the important principles in GUI design is that your user interface must always be responsive and never hang. In practice this means you have to make sure that any data processing is always outside of the GUI thread. Unfortunately many applications still do not do this. I sometimes wonder if the developers of such an application actually use their own program. Don't they get annoyed when they see the program hang? Or maybe they're just too lazy to fix the problem.
Maybe they really are desperate. Users want security, but Microsoft can't change too much in the OS without breaking compatibility with apps that were written for older versions of their OS. So what were they going to do? Asking the user for confirmation when doing a potential 'dangerous' operation was the easiest thing to implement for them.