I agree MS are a lesser evil than Apple. Their culture is particularly far friendly for developers. However, what you've said is rose-tinted. MS did try to pus

I agree MS are a lesser evil than Apple. Their culture is particularly far friendly for developers. However, what you've said is rose-tinted. MS did try to push people into software as a service (but they failed at it). They support DVD region encoding. They have introduced DRM music services. They struck agreements to hamper attempts to sell dual-boot systems. I didn't experience this but understand that at one point windows media player would happily scan existing content on the drive and helpfully encomber it with DRM. Sharepoint takes data in from all sorts of sources but it's much harder to get it out again. MS have also EOL'd products that dominate major market segments despite users who would have paid plenty for stability: original VB, excel before UI change, every NT release. These are the actions of a company trying to increase its control on users, attempting to control what they do on their computer. By way of comparison, traditional unix vendors would be more helpful of big-pocketed companies who wanted to pay to continue to use old software. They could have reversed a firewall and other patches into NT4 that would have hardened it and kept it going if they'd wanted to - these are the teams that reverse-engineered photoshop and hundreds of games and then hotpatched new code over their memory segments when they loaded so that they could get DOS and W3.1 software to run fine on Windows 95 for the release. Interesting alternate history. What if MS had tried to keep NT4sp3 tight and stable and kept drivers coming, and brought it forward conservatively.