Pluses and Minuses of Microsoft
Yahoo | at | by Mike
Computer industry pundits and government lawyers don't get their exercise from jogging, they get it from kicking around Microsoft, the leading "evil empire" since the Soviet Union called it quits. If there had been no Microsoft, it's safe to say there would be today no personal computer hardware or software industry worldwide - or at least not in its present stage. In the world of business, the ability to use Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint are assumed skills and the everyone-uses-it formats for exchange of documents and financial data between companies. If you are designing a Web page, you view it first in Internet Explorer.
Those who bemoan the loss of diversity of choice in systems and hardware miss the point. In some activities - and mass personal computing is one of them - diversity is deadly. We must all drive on the same side of the road, all the time, no exceptions. Telephones must generate the correct Touch-Tone frequencies all the time, no exceptions.