"Am I the only one who is sick and tired of all this "honoring" one of the biggest bandits in history?" I'm on the outside looking at Gates but here's the thin

"Am I the only one who is sick and tired of all this "honoring" one of the biggest bandits in history?" I'm on the outside looking at Gates but here's the thing that troubles me with this line of ad hominem: Had MS not been so aggressive, how many proprietary OSs would there have been through the decades of the 80s and 90s and to today? Same deal with the different Office-type products or enterprise apps. In forcefully promoting a common framework, MS penetrated PCs broader, deeper, and faster into the world. The reverberations of that reality are unknowable. But without Gates and MS, I don't see a kindler, gentler version of MS. I see lots of competing alternatives (in all their different markets) for many, many more years. Maybe that's good for more businesses and the eventual products, but as a user going through the many transitions it would have been painful. Take something as simple (and "evil") as pre-loading Internet Explorer onto Windows machines. Sure it killed Netscape, but more importantly it flooded the market with new users. Outlook (and email) is the same deal. With the common framework, there was a Tower of Babel for us to live and work on. In light of those results, it's very hard for me to argue with the methods. Even now, most of us own one iPod and that product line is just as "evil" as anything MS put out (though much better looking!).