"Especially since you admit you can't do without Windows for "complicated graphics"."
Actually I said, "I confess I do tend to drop into Paint Shop Pro on Windows if I want to do complex graphics -
I know I could do it with GIMP but I get lazy."
Truth to tell, I don't have a quarrel with Dave Cutler's Windows NT kernel after v5.0 - well implemented, its very stable and can certainly be make secure enough. What I don't like is Microsoft's business practices, which I don't believe are good for any of us and certainly not good for the industry. Running a business is tough and competitive, as it should be, but MS insistence on crushing all competition in the egg (apart from Apple, kept on for cosmetic purposes) certainly hinders innovation and detracts from consumer choice.
I won't bore readers with a long list of MS' misdeeds, they can always read Judge Penfield Jackson's "Findings of Fact" in the US vs Microsoft case -
U.S. v. Microsoft: Court's Findings of Fact - but the recent, largely successful attempts to subvert and discredit ISO, the International Organisation for Standardisation over the (unimplemented and unimplementable) OOXML "standard" is typical. The recent disappearance of Linux from netbooks, in the face of MS threats to manufacturers is another. And there are many, many more.
It is somewhat worrying that here we have a company that is SO wealthy that it is able to absorb a 2 billion dollar fine by the EU as merely the price required for it to go on doing what it wants.
Several posters have brought up the subject of compatibility and this can indeed be a problem. But the fact remains that the vast majority of these incompatibilities are deliberately manufactured by MS to shut out potential competitors. The purposeful corruption of the old IBM SMB protocol in order to make problems for heterogeneous networks, the corruption of Java so as to make OS agnostic applications fail, undocumented binary blobs in file formats, the corruption of HTML in an attempt to own the Web.....the list goes on and on.
Certainly, no company can be expected to facilitate life for competitors, but that is a long way from using your wealth and power to actively hinder them.
I think we should have a REAL choice, and if MS could be compelled (or persuaded) to concentrate more on improving its products and less on undermining other players we would all be better off.
Mac