I agree that many software manufacturer's probably also follow MS' market plan as well. I am not saying that the government should intervene. I am saying that if consumers aren't happy with the product (IE Explorer, for example) then they shouldn't use it. I feel that there are too many people who don't really know which product better suits their needs and are willing to just go with the flow and buy everything MS because that's what they are used to buying. It is like the people who actually believe that AT&T provides a good product and good prices. There are actually still people out there who would never try anything that isn't AT&T because that's what they've always used. I am not saying that there is a solution to what I see as a problem, but rather I have never and will never buy a MS product with my own money or by choice. My old Macintosh laptop which I use for real basic stuff (Quicken, etc.) came with Word and Excel, but I usually use Claris' products which were better until they were crushed out of the market. As far as real work, I use PC's which run Windows NT which crashes all of the time. We are forced to use PC's because all of our experimental software is written only for Windows. Not much choice there. Besides Excel, Word, and Explorer, we have deleted every other MS product from the computer, including IE Explorer, because we have better non-MS products for everything else we do. For plotting, we use Sigma Plot rather than MS Graph, etc.
Maybe we are too idealistic or have too much money, but we choose to use the better product. MS is doing its best to make it difficult for us to do that, however....
Thanks for the civilized exchange of opinions. Good luck with all of your investments.
-Dylan |
