Would you PLEASE turn OFF the RTF formatting?

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Thurmond [mailto:p_thurmond@yahoo.com]

> I know your completely abhorrent to XP, and 
> I don't blame you. But your biggest complaint 
> I see so far is that it costs money. 

No, my biggest objection is that Microsoft routinely takes over control of
the installation, configuration, and increasingly the operation of their
software.  You can't meaningfully control what's installed any more.  You're
forced to do things like install not only a web browser but a web server if
you want to run a mail server.

It started about the time they decided to try to "integrate" IE with Windows
9x.  No, actually, it was really more something that was with 95 from the
beginning - the shortcuts to MSN and AOL that you couldn't delete, things
like that.

There was Small Business Server - to enable email, you had to set up
internet service through the scripts, which only allowed you to configure
ISP's that had paid to be MS partners.  Surprise!  There weren't any in
Kansas City, and the national ones were really bad deals!  Once you broke
the script, you couldn't use the 'wizards' for any of the management, which
was the whole point of the package.  (They also "ran out" of licenses, like
they did for the family license of XP, and we had to hack the license system
to get it up in the same month we delivered it.)

It's just gotten worse from there.  XP and .NET are just full of crap you
can't turn off.  And how about those "Xtags" or whatever, that hijack your
document to Microsoft Partnered Web Sites?  What if you want to run XP in a
closed intranet without access to the .NET and Passport servers?  Tough!

Want secure transactions?  Verisign or the highway, buddy.  No options.  No
local servers.

Want to serve your address book as an LDAP database?  Sorry, LDAP was an
afterthought on Exchange, you'll have to hand-enter the entire directory as
local users of your server.

Want to upgrade to a new computer?  Using Outlook Express 5.0 or better?
Sorry, you can't move your mail filters, because they're stored under a
unique identifier in the registry, and if you export them and import them to
a newer machine, you'll corrupt the registry and have an unbootable computer
(FDISK).

It's the whole "don't worry, we know what's best, nothing can go worng"
attitude that hacks me off.

Windows 95 on a Pentium 166 was the best thing to happen to the computer
industry since the transistor.  Microsoft products have better, more
consistent and adaptive user interfaces than any other company's, including
Apple's (try using a Mac without a mouse for more than three minutes).  Not,
perhaps, through any virtue of their own, but because they've bought the
best when they didn't write it themselves.

Their re-write of the early Mosaic browser code cleaned out bugs that still
plague all of the Netscape/Mozilla clones to this day, because Microsoft did
the dirty work that the other developers couldn't be bothered with.

So no, it's not the money, it's not even the quality of the code, it's the
attitude that gets me.