Dont upgrade to vista, I have one laptop with it but unlike xp theres no need for vista yet! Sony tried to crush the original xbox with brutal price drops! do you think Sony cares for its competition!

Dont use windows use linux or what ever you want you cant play many games because they need direct x if you upgrade a pc from say Windows me to xp you get the upgrade for $90.00 with everything thats in it you can have MS send you a complete xp service pack 2 upgrade disk free and updates are free thats product support! I dont fell a need for all the new stuff .

It all goes back to ma bell the old phone CO. broken up for monopoly purposes to create competition. Yet when boken up there really wasnt comp. Created just a lot of smaller companies with thier own territories no real competition!

I guess MS could license their code and stop dev. and let others dev. like nvidia sells a basic chip to devs. and each manufacturer makes its own version of a game card compatiblity problems maybe but then MS could downsize and all the PEEPS they employ would go to work for thier licensed developers! Open Source does apple offer open source????

I think that's a bad example.  HD DVD had a very real shot at winning.  The war could have quickly swung the other way had Warner backed HD DVD exclusively despite Sony using it as a trojan horse in the PS3.  If Microsoft was so hell bent on destroying Blu Ray, they could have.  Their profits from other divisions could have handled selling several millions of units of HD DVD at $100 to flood the market with those players forcing support to go HD DVD (much the way the PS3 worked for Sony).  They could have also taken the millions they lost on HD DVD and worked hard to revamp their download service which is supposed to beat Blu Ray anyway.  Blu Ray would have been the defacto choice w/o HD DVD, however the war created much more hype in the HD market and forced Blu Ray to a mass market price much more quickly.  Really, who would buy a $1,000 Blu Ray player even if it was the only way to get true HD.

it's simple, people hate you when you become successful

MS' software domination make things easier, you dont need to worry incompatibility, you dont need to convert this convert that, if it wasn't MS, i think the PC technology will step back 6-7 years

I like Microsoft actually.  If you look at the company history and its progress since creation, its accomplishments are nothing short of astounding.

Copying others software...market it as your own,create mediocre and defectve products...create 1GB OS that arent better than your rivals 2MB ones just to push the hardware manufactures so they pay you back putting your OS in their computers aby default and makes the clients pay..to try to put the nose in everything and make everybody pay you for everything they do trying to force your propietary software....all that is not maybe evil but its harmful and MS has a business idea that must be countered and beat.

Weren't they in courts a few times in monopoly charges.

People hate them because they seem like a monopoly (not saying they aren't or not or not trying to be) and the constant charging for crap stuff (different types of OS-home,ultimate, etc.. and xbl)

Microsoft OS monopoly is the worst thing that ever happened in the computer world. They really should get competition so they would be ashame to release crap like Vista.

I believe that their gaming division is bringing a lot to the industry so it's not all bad.

I don't think MS is evil, I just thing most everything they make is sub par. They are the Yugo/Kia/Hundia of the software industry.

I don't tend to use there stuff because in almost every market they are in, there is a better option. The only area where they are great, is email servers, and office suites. MS Office has it's problems, but it's definitely better then anything else out there.

MS exists solely because Bill Gates is one of the greatest liar/cheater/stealers alive today. Everything about how he built the company and its product lines leads back to bold faced lies and outright theft of ideas. That, and their illegal business practices. Time and time again MS has been taken to court for breaking the law and has lost many times and now billions of dollars for it. Oh, and let's not forget their desire to charge more for inferior products simply because they have a monopoly that no one in the government has the balls to break up.

Really, the company is rotten to the core and has been since its first day.

I thought I killed this discussion?

Alright fine, you want more proof?

As you can see this fully backs up ChichiriMuyo's point about bill gates.