The fact remains that Mac's really run hardly any software compared to PC's.
Apart from ACAD and some games, kindly give an example or two.
Your "fact" was never really true to begin with, but in the OS X era, just about anything you want to do on a Mac that there isn't a Mac program for, there's probably a UNIX or Linux program out there that will run on the Mac and work just fine. In fact, when you combine all that UNIX/Linux code out there with all the OS X apps, there's probably more software available to an OS X user than there is to a Windows-only zealot.
I have a Windows PC, and these days it only gets switched on when I want to play Neverwinter Nights for a couple hours. I also have a couple Linux boxen which sit untouched in my closet running Apache, Postgres, and a few other server apps (which I could just do on a Mac, but I had a couple old x86 machines lying around, so I put them to good use.)
Everything else I do: programming, editing media content, browsing, arguing on slashdot, exchanging e-mail, word processing, doing my taxes, administrating my web server, audio recording, etc., I do with either my Mac tower or my iBook. Everything.
You are the one that doesn't understand bonds. I'll try to make it simple for you... (comment followed by an explanation of what bonds are, which I already knew.
I did not say that investors buying bonds increased the deficit.
As I re-read your previous post, I see that you did not, in fact, intend to say that. The sentence "this runs the deficit up," was meant to refer to the tax cut, not the sale of bonds, but the clumsy structure of that paragraph, combined with my lazy reading of it, lead to a moment of miscomunication.
However, I put this to you:
From your original post: " If you want money stimulate the economy, then give it to people who need to spend it."
From your latest reply: "I never suggested higher taxation."
So, you advocate more social welfare spending, but with neither higher taxation, nor deficits. A perfect plan, other than being completely impossible.
Bonds: The rich will buy government bonds. Why is that bad? Because the bonds are used to fund the deficit. So Bush pushes through a tax cut for the wealthy. This runs the deficit up.
Okay, you obviously don't know how the bond market works. The number of Federal bonds issued has nothing to do with how many people want to buy them. Investors playing the bond market does not drive the debt up.
Sure I can. Without welfare, many unemployed people...
Easy, big feller. I didn't suggest eliminating welfare. I only said that an increase of welfare benifits is not an effective way to end an economic slump. Proof of my point is the fact that this is exactly what was attempted from about 1972 until 1981, and it failed utterly. Most economists in 1979 reached the consensus that the US would experience a second Great Depression by 1983. How did we prevent that from happening? Tax cuts and deficit spending.
Deficits in bleak times make sense, because it shifts some of the pain into more prosperous times, when the burden can be handled. During a recession, not only are tax revenues down, but demands for government services (such as unemployment benifits) skyrockets. It's pretty much impossible to meet 100% of the government's obligations during a recession without government borrowing. To even attempt to do so is not only futile, but counter-productive, as higher taxation would only serve to slow down the recovery.
So what's your point? That we should have no one overseeing the programs and, instead, just leave the money in big baskets in poor neighborhoods?
No, my point is that increased spending on social programs in not going to be the massive boon to the economy that the original post had implied. You can make the case that more welfare is a good idea, but not on the grounds that it will end the recession any more quickly.
Paying huge sums of interest on the federal debt hurts the GDP while fiddling with taxation has little to do with economic growth according to most respected economists.
Okay, let's just tax everything over $50,000 a year at a rate of 100% then. Nobody really needs to make more that $50,000, right? Sure, nobody will have surplus wealth to invest in the market, but think of all the nifty new government programs we could afford!
Let's look at this rationally: What does the federal government do with tax dollars?
Mostly, it hires bureaucrats who don't produce anything.
That money then goes to U.S. workers who spend it, supporting everyone from salespeople to restaurant workers to truck drivers.
Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. If all the money we are supposedly spending on the poor actually ended up in the hands of the poor, we could put each and every poor family in America into ritsy hotel rooms, complete with room service for their meals. The overwhelming majority of the money collected by our government in the name of assisting the lower class is pissed away in ways that do almost nothing to impove the lives of those who actually need help.
If you want money stimulate the economy, then give it to people who need to spend it.
That only stimulates consumer spending (assuming that much of the money you are talking about ever gets to those who need it, which is total fantasy.) What the economy needs right now is a stimulus of investment, not just spending. Taking money away from those who would invest it in the market is not going to stop the downward spiral of the value of your 401K.
OK, how long does it take your computer to boot from a cold start?
What, you mean like when I eventually buy a new battery for my iBook?
I mean, I could see wanting to shut it down if it were a Windows PC, because then it would actually consume more power than a little night-light while in sleep mode. My Macs don't have that problem; they sleep deeper and run without fans.
How long does Word take to start? How about Mozilla? What about your e-mail program? How long does it take to search through your e-mail archive of 15000 messages?
Those are all reflections of how slow your HD is, not your CPU.
The times when CPU speed does matter is when I'm compiling code, running certain Photoshop filters, or working with video. None of the examples you gave would be improved much by putting in a faster CPU, even if I'm doubling or trippling my current CPU speed.
It's not a question of wanting computers to be faster, it's a question of where computer engineers should be focussing their energy on. Improved motherboard bus speed, faster storage media, faster media access, faster memory, faster networking, etc. are all far more important to real-world performace right now that getting the P4 up to 6 GHz.
Nobody who cares about sound quality is going to encode at 96. iTunes defaults its encoder at 128, and I suspect if the waves were also identical at both speeds for that bit-rate, you would have said so... and since they are not, you chose the data set that fits your argument. If somebody here is trolling, it would appear to be you.
The issue I have with $.99 per song is that it is in most cases above the threshold of value to me. If, for instance, I would like to purchase all 12 tracks from an artist's album I would be required to pay Apple $12.
RTFA, MF. If you want all the tracks, Apple sells complete albums for $9.99. Not as cheap as a used disk (when you can find one), but certainly cheaper than retail CD's.
I have listened to my music from hotels many times without the need for my iPod.
And I've listened to mine from hotels, on airplanes, in cars, and while jogging, without the need for an internet connection, nor the need to boot up my laptop.
For most stuff, I agree. Any time I want a full album, it still makes more sense to buy a used CD from Cheapo Records than to buy from the iTMS.
However, for some things, iTMS kicks ass. For example, remember The Who's electronics phase in the 80's? Those albums mostly really sucked, but a three or four of the songs from that time (Emenence Front, Teenage Wasteland, etc.) were downright catchy. Now I can have them for a buck a piece without having to pay for the "pleasure" of enduring the filler crap that they padded those albums out with. Yes, they are AAC, which is != 44.1 Compact Disc audio, but those recordings were not exactly Sheffield Labs "Direct-To-Disk" feats of audio engineering in the first place, so it's not like I'm losing much by getting AAC files. Even on my high-end living room stereo with sweet B&W speakers, it sounds pretty darn good.
Like you, I will still insist on CD (or vinyl!) for excelent hi-fi albums, like Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," or my Reference Recordings disk of Oue conducting "Pictures at an Exhibition," but for 90% of my pop music I am already leaving the CD's in the case and listening to them by plugging my iPod into the stereo.
Frankly, I'm not too worried about it. I sneaker net all my crap to work via iPod anyway.
If I had mod points to give, one would be yours, FRB.
When I first heard about the iTunes streaming service, I immidiately began speculating about the many ways I would use it. The thought of accessing all of my music from all over my house and even at work, while keeping it all stored on HD that's shared out to everywhere else I go... it seemed like a new Golden Age was dawning.
But then, for the sake of my CD-less car stereo and listening to music while jogging, I bought an iPod. Once I had the iPod, all these thoughts of streaming completely vanished. I've got my entire record collection in my hip pocket at all times now, and I can listen to it on any music device that I can extend a stereo mini-jack from (which, thanks to RCA-to-mini cables, FM transmitters, and those tape adapter thingies, means damned near everything that has speakers.) Screw streaming from a server... I would need another computer running iTunes to do that. The iPod is the music library now. Every time I get another album (or cave into the desire to download a song off iTMS,) I just rip to my main computer, and sync the iPod to it in a matter of seconds next time I plug in the Firewire cable (which won't be long, since that's how I recharge the iPod 90% of the time).
I had friends parrot the "iPod will change the way you listen to music," hype to me over the past year or so... and now that I have an iPod, I see the light. You can call us all "pod people" if you like, (or "iPod people"... hmm, "iPeople?") but this tiny little gadget actually was a bigger revolution than I really expected it to be before buying it. Those of you who haven't acquired an iPod yet probably think I'm crazy, but iTunes for Windows comes out at the end of this year and the rest of the world will catch up. I'll see you when you get here. I now value my cheap little iPod more than my car or my TV. The hype was not a lie.
Look more closely. This is not a DRM means to "restrict rights to music you bought" from their store. This is a limitation of how you can use the iTunes app. You can't stream off the network with their application.
You can still play your AAC files purchaced from the iTunes Music Store, even if you Mac "died" (as you put it). For that matter, you can archive all of those files as either AAC or AIFF files on any media you chose, including the HD of your Linux PC (which should be able to support AAC "any day now")
You seem to have this crazy notion that AAC is another Windows Media Player file alternative, created solely to place ultra restrictions on files and force you to "rent" music rather than purchace it (as a new Microsoft music service is expected to do in a few months). Nothing could be further from the truth. AAC was invented at Dolby for the purpose of offering a better compression algorythm than MP3, and it succeeds briliantly. At a bit-rate of 128, it sounds as good or better than a 192 VBR MP3. Yes, it stores some information in the DRM layer... this is exactly why it will become the new standard. It permits fair use (archiving, copying to other sources, listening on other playback equipment, sharing it with close friends) without allowing you to freely rip off and distribute the files they sell you (and are trying to sell to others) to the entire world.
Kindly offer one example of "fair use" which is prevented by the DRM restrictions Apple places on the files they sell you (and only the files they sell you). Here's a little help: "Fair Use," according to US copyright law, includes the right to make back-ups, to make copies to other media, to extract samples for educational use. Fare Use does not include the right to make copies available to other people, although the files sold by Apple actually allow that on a limited basis.
Now, which Fair Use rights do you think we are being denied? We are all very anxious to hear this.
I don't think that's true at all. If a movie's not good enough to be worth $8.50, it's probably not good enough to be worth taking two hours out of your life to go see.
Renting videos carries fewer demands on a movie, because you can sit and chat with your friends while a bad movie is playing on the TV screen. Going out to the theater means giving a movie your undivided attention, and I could not imagine doing so for something like Bruce Almighty or Daddy Day Care, so a ticket discount will do absolutely nothing to intice me into the theater.
But at eight bucks (actually, it's more like $7.50 for theaters in my area), I will probably see LOTR:ROTK at least three times on the big screen. In fact, I would probably do so if it was $10.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't SCO created in the first place because Microsoft had to sell off Xenix to avoid anti-trust entanglements? I think you are on to something there... if this really was about putting up an IP stink, it would just about be the most dangerous path that MS could take to do so.
There wasn't much point in anecdotally telling everyone four random groups that weren't properly represented. But I wanted to list them all to show how cool my musical tastes are. Apple is really lacking in their music store if they don't have these few things I mentioned. Of course, these groups are sort of my guilty pleasures. I would call them sellouts because more than 25 people have heard of them.
Very funny, but my guilty pleasures actually consist of stuff like old Heart (Dreamboat Annie rocks, and I ain't afraid to say it), and new Rush (the '1337 consensus is that they were over by the time Grace Under Pressure came out, but I really dig their stuff from the 90s).
Unlike some people, my favorite alt bands don't stop being cool to me when they sign with big labels. I don't think any of the bands I mentioned are really all that obscure, do you?
Finally, my comment was not intended to be anything more than anecdotal, as my anecdotal experience is all I feel qualified to comment on. Perhaps you would have prefered if I pretended to be a guru of all styles and genres of pop, and declared definitively on how complete the Apple library is. That kind of feigned expertise would certainly fit in a lot better with general practices on this site I suppose.
Gadfly is now distributing his entire catalog, including the What? stuff he did in the 90's. You can go to www.gadflyrecords.com and see for yourself.:)
Still no sign of "Hit Somebody (The Hockey Song)" by Warren Zevon.
Also, they still only have part of the Cibo Matto album "Viva! La Woman," and have only two albums from They Might Be Giants.
But it is getting there. I'm very pleased I was able to download Cake's "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" without paying for the rest of the album, which frankly sounds exactly the same as their last three albums, only without the novelty of being fresh and new.
Once the Apple catches up stocking the stuff I just mentioned, then maybe they will move on to the more obscure bands and indie labels.
Sure, dude. Whatever. Microsoft can't do anything right, period. They've never earned anything. They're evil, bad, and wrong. Whatever you say.
I didn't say they never did anything right; I didn't say they were evil, bad or wrong. Those were your words, not mine. I said monopoly. The fact that the business PC market has been completely under Microsoft's control for years is not really debatable. Nor is the fact that they got there by usurping the old IBM monopoly.
Don't be silly. This is old history. Everybody knows that Microsoft rode the IBM monopoly into power, and stole it from under them by shitcanning OS/2 while developing Windows to run on "IBM Clones" made by Compaq and others.
Business PC's were and IBM monopoly, and people wanted computers that could run what everybody called "IBM software" at the time. When the IBM ROM chipset was reverse-engineered, the IBM monopoly became the Microsoft monopoly. It had nothing to do with people loving Windows and everything to do with tax accountants and insurance analysts insisting on legacy support of their favorite DOS programs.
Microsoft has been running a monopoly since the days when they got salesmen to stop saying "IBM Compatable" and use the universal term "PC" to refer exclusively to personal computers that run Windows.
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Apart from ACAD and some games, kindly give an example or two.
Your "fact" was never really true to begin with, but in the OS X era, just about anything you want to do on a Mac that there isn't a Mac program for, there's probably a UNIX or Linux program out there that will run on the Mac and work just fine. In fact, when you combine all that UNIX/Linux code out there with all the OS X apps, there's probably more software available to an OS X user than there is to a Windows-only zealot.
I have a Windows PC, and these days it only gets switched on when I want to play Neverwinter Nights for a couple hours. I also have a couple Linux boxen which sit untouched in my closet running Apache, Postgres, and a few other server apps (which I could just do on a Mac, but I had a couple old x86 machines lying around, so I put them to good use.)
Everything else I do: programming, editing media content, browsing, arguing on slashdot, exchanging e-mail, word processing, doing my taxes, administrating my web server, audio recording, etc., I do with either my Mac tower or my iBook. Everything.
Sometimes you can learn a lot by observing failures.
I did not say that investors buying bonds increased the deficit.
As I re-read your previous post, I see that you did not, in fact, intend to say that. The sentence "this runs the deficit up," was meant to refer to the tax cut, not the sale of bonds, but the clumsy structure of that paragraph, combined with my lazy reading of it, lead to a moment of miscomunication.
However, I put this to you:
From your original post: " If you want money stimulate the economy, then give it to people who need to spend it."
From your latest reply: "I never suggested higher taxation."
So, you advocate more social welfare spending, but with neither higher taxation, nor deficits. A perfect plan, other than being completely impossible.
Have you ever considered running for office?
Okay, you obviously don't know how the bond market works. The number of Federal bonds issued has nothing to do with how many people want to buy them. Investors playing the bond market does not drive the debt up.
Sure I can. Without welfare, many unemployed people...
Easy, big feller. I didn't suggest eliminating welfare. I only said that an increase of welfare benifits is not an effective way to end an economic slump. Proof of my point is the fact that this is exactly what was attempted from about 1972 until 1981, and it failed utterly. Most economists in 1979 reached the consensus that the US would experience a second Great Depression by 1983. How did we prevent that from happening? Tax cuts and deficit spending.
Deficits in bleak times make sense, because it shifts some of the pain into more prosperous times, when the burden can be handled. During a recession, not only are tax revenues down, but demands for government services (such as unemployment benifits) skyrockets. It's pretty much impossible to meet 100% of the government's obligations during a recession without government borrowing. To even attempt to do so is not only futile, but counter-productive, as higher taxation would only serve to slow down the recovery.
No, my point is that increased spending on social programs in not going to be the massive boon to the economy that the original post had implied. You can make the case that more welfare is a good idea, but not on the grounds that it will end the recession any more quickly.
Actually, somebody is calling to repeal the 22nd Amendment, but it's not Bush.
Okay, let's just tax everything over $50,000 a year at a rate of 100% then. Nobody really needs to make more that $50,000, right? Sure, nobody will have surplus wealth to invest in the market, but think of all the nifty new government programs we could afford!
Let's look at this rationally: What does the federal government do with tax dollars?
Mostly, it hires bureaucrats who don't produce anything.
That money then goes to U.S. workers who spend it, supporting everyone from salespeople to restaurant workers to truck drivers.
Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. If all the money we are supposedly spending on the poor actually ended up in the hands of the poor, we could put each and every poor family in America into ritsy hotel rooms, complete with room service for their meals. The overwhelming majority of the money collected by our government in the name of assisting the lower class is pissed away in ways that do almost nothing to impove the lives of those who actually need help.
If you want money stimulate the economy, then give it to people who need to spend it.
That only stimulates consumer spending (assuming that much of the money you are talking about ever gets to those who need it, which is total fantasy.) What the economy needs right now is a stimulus of investment, not just spending. Taking money away from those who would invest it in the market is not going to stop the downward spiral of the value of your 401K.
I think this a good time to talk about boundries. Look, it's okay to love your Mac. Just don't... "LOVE"... your Mac.
What, you mean like when I eventually buy a new battery for my iBook?
I mean, I could see wanting to shut it down if it were a Windows PC, because then it would actually consume more power than a little night-light while in sleep mode. My Macs don't have that problem; they sleep deeper and run without fans.
How long does Word take to start? How about Mozilla? What about your e-mail program? How long does it take to search through your e-mail archive of 15000 messages?
Those are all reflections of how slow your HD is, not your CPU.
The times when CPU speed does matter is when I'm compiling code, running certain Photoshop filters, or working with video. None of the examples you gave would be improved much by putting in a faster CPU, even if I'm doubling or trippling my current CPU speed.
It's not a question of wanting computers to be faster, it's a question of where computer engineers should be focussing their energy on. Improved motherboard bus speed, faster storage media, faster media access, faster memory, faster networking, etc. are all far more important to real-world performace right now that getting the P4 up to 6 GHz.
Nobody who cares about sound quality is going to encode at 96. iTunes defaults its encoder at 128, and I suspect if the waves were also identical at both speeds for that bit-rate, you would have said so... and since they are not, you chose the data set that fits your argument. If somebody here is trolling, it would appear to be you.
Now there's a man who knows how to dream!
RTFA, MF. If you want all the tracks, Apple sells complete albums for $9.99. Not as cheap as a used disk (when you can find one), but certainly cheaper than retail CD's.
And I've listened to mine from hotels, on airplanes, in cars, and while jogging, without the need for an internet connection, nor the need to boot up my laptop.
However, for some things, iTMS kicks ass. For example, remember The Who's electronics phase in the 80's? Those albums mostly really sucked, but a three or four of the songs from that time (Emenence Front, Teenage Wasteland, etc.) were downright catchy. Now I can have them for a buck a piece without having to pay for the "pleasure" of enduring the filler crap that they padded those albums out with. Yes, they are AAC, which is != 44.1 Compact Disc audio, but those recordings were not exactly Sheffield Labs "Direct-To-Disk" feats of audio engineering in the first place, so it's not like I'm losing much by getting AAC files. Even on my high-end living room stereo with sweet B&W speakers, it sounds pretty darn good.
Like you, I will still insist on CD (or vinyl!) for excelent hi-fi albums, like Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," or my Reference Recordings disk of Oue conducting "Pictures at an Exhibition," but for 90% of my pop music I am already leaving the CD's in the case and listening to them by plugging my iPod into the stereo.
If I had mod points to give, one would be yours, FRB.
When I first heard about the iTunes streaming service, I immidiately began speculating about the many ways I would use it. The thought of accessing all of my music from all over my house and even at work, while keeping it all stored on HD that's shared out to everywhere else I go... it seemed like a new Golden Age was dawning.
But then, for the sake of my CD-less car stereo and listening to music while jogging, I bought an iPod. Once I had the iPod, all these thoughts of streaming completely vanished. I've got my entire record collection in my hip pocket at all times now, and I can listen to it on any music device that I can extend a stereo mini-jack from (which, thanks to RCA-to-mini cables, FM transmitters, and those tape adapter thingies, means damned near everything that has speakers.) Screw streaming from a server... I would need another computer running iTunes to do that. The iPod is the music library now. Every time I get another album (or cave into the desire to download a song off iTMS,) I just rip to my main computer, and sync the iPod to it in a matter of seconds next time I plug in the Firewire cable (which won't be long, since that's how I recharge the iPod 90% of the time).
I had friends parrot the "iPod will change the way you listen to music," hype to me over the past year or so... and now that I have an iPod, I see the light. You can call us all "pod people" if you like, (or "iPod people"... hmm, "iPeople?") but this tiny little gadget actually was a bigger revolution than I really expected it to be before buying it. Those of you who haven't acquired an iPod yet probably think I'm crazy, but iTunes for Windows comes out at the end of this year and the rest of the world will catch up. I'll see you when you get here. I now value my cheap little iPod more than my car or my TV. The hype was not a lie.
Fuck streaming.
You can still play your AAC files purchaced from the iTunes Music Store, even if you Mac "died" (as you put it). For that matter, you can archive all of those files as either AAC or AIFF files on any media you chose, including the HD of your Linux PC (which should be able to support AAC "any day now")
You seem to have this crazy notion that AAC is another Windows Media Player file alternative, created solely to place ultra restrictions on files and force you to "rent" music rather than purchace it (as a new Microsoft music service is expected to do in a few months). Nothing could be further from the truth. AAC was invented at Dolby for the purpose of offering a better compression algorythm than MP3, and it succeeds briliantly. At a bit-rate of 128, it sounds as good or better than a 192 VBR MP3. Yes, it stores some information in the DRM layer... this is exactly why it will become the new standard. It permits fair use (archiving, copying to other sources, listening on other playback equipment, sharing it with close friends) without allowing you to freely rip off and distribute the files they sell you (and are trying to sell to others) to the entire world.
Kindly offer one example of "fair use" which is prevented by the DRM restrictions Apple places on the files they sell you (and only the files they sell you). Here's a little help: "Fair Use," according to US copyright law, includes the right to make back-ups, to make copies to other media, to extract samples for educational use. Fare Use does not include the right to make copies available to other people, although the files sold by Apple actually allow that on a limited basis.
Now, which Fair Use rights do you think we are being denied? We are all very anxious to hear this.
Renting videos carries fewer demands on a movie, because you can sit and chat with your friends while a bad movie is playing on the TV screen. Going out to the theater means giving a movie your undivided attention, and I could not imagine doing so for something like Bruce Almighty or Daddy Day Care, so a ticket discount will do absolutely nothing to intice me into the theater.
But at eight bucks (actually, it's more like $7.50 for theaters in my area), I will probably see LOTR:ROTK at least three times on the big screen. In fact, I would probably do so if it was $10.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't SCO created in the first place because Microsoft had to sell off Xenix to avoid anti-trust entanglements? I think you are on to something there... if this really was about putting up an IP stink, it would just about be the most dangerous path that MS could take to do so.
Very funny, but my guilty pleasures actually consist of stuff like old Heart (Dreamboat Annie rocks, and I ain't afraid to say it), and new Rush (the '1337 consensus is that they were over by the time Grace Under Pressure came out, but I really dig their stuff from the 90s).
Unlike some people, my favorite alt bands don't stop being cool to me when they sign with big labels. I don't think any of the bands I mentioned are really all that obscure, do you?
Finally, my comment was not intended to be anything more than anecdotal, as my anecdotal experience is all I feel qualified to comment on. Perhaps you would have prefered if I pretended to be a guru of all styles and genres of pop, and declared definitively on how complete the Apple library is. That kind of feigned expertise would certainly fit in a lot better with general practices on this site I suppose.
Gadfly is now distributing his entire catalog, including the What? stuff he did in the 90's. You can go to www.gadflyrecords.com and see for yourself. :)
My kingdom for a mod point! That was a (+1, Funny) post if ever I saw one.
Me too. I will not stop nagging them until "Life In The Foodchain" by Tonio K. (from the plucky little Gadfly Records) is in the fold.
Also, they still only have part of the Cibo Matto album "Viva! La Woman," and have only two albums from They Might Be Giants.
But it is getting there. I'm very pleased I was able to download Cake's "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" without paying for the rest of the album, which frankly sounds exactly the same as their last three albums, only without the novelty of being fresh and new.
Once the Apple catches up stocking the stuff I just mentioned, then maybe they will move on to the more obscure bands and indie labels.
I didn't say they never did anything right; I didn't say they were evil, bad or wrong. Those were your words, not mine. I said monopoly. The fact that the business PC market has been completely under Microsoft's control for years is not really debatable. Nor is the fact that they got there by usurping the old IBM monopoly.
Business PC's were and IBM monopoly, and people wanted computers that could run what everybody called "IBM software" at the time. When the IBM ROM chipset was reverse-engineered, the IBM monopoly became the Microsoft monopoly. It had nothing to do with people loving Windows and everything to do with tax accountants and insurance analysts insisting on legacy support of their favorite DOS programs.
Microsoft has been running a monopoly since the days when they got salesmen to stop saying "IBM Compatable" and use the universal term "PC" to refer exclusively to personal computers that run Windows.