This is a fairly old article from the beginnings of Ximian (hint at it's age that it was still called Helix Code). And most of his points are valid - Linux had

This is a fairly old article from the beginnings of Ximian (hint at it's age that it was still called Helix Code). And most of his points are valid - Linux had a LONG WAY TO GO at the point he wrote this. Ximian did a lot to change that. Before Novell bought them, Ximian pushed their own more polished build of Gnome, and produced products like Evolution and the Exchange connector (then a paid, licensed product which was worth every penny for those of us stuck in companies using Exchange) which really changed the game for Linux on the desktop. The reality is, as a few other people have said - not everything Microsoft does is bad. I'm of the opinion that their Apps (e.g. Office) and OS (e.g. "Vista") groups are the issue most people think of. Ancient, bloated code with no real vision, and stomping on the competition. Yet, if you look at what the .Net team does lately, they have fulltime Python and Ruby developers, they've made huge efforts to contribute code outward to the community and standardise things. There is cooperation happening, partly because people inside and outside Microsoft are making an effort to change things. If you stand around beating the "Microsoft is evil" drum you at the least ignore the fact that Windows has ~80-90% Market share (roughly ad libbing #s from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows) for desktop computers. The reality is this: NOT EVERYTHING MICROSOFT DOES IS WRONG. They clearly are doing some things right, and the early Gnome efforts (from my observation and opinion at least) seemed to echo that fact in how they improved the UI and usability. No, I'm not saying we should make Unix windows, and certainly I'm remembering this is an almost 10 year old article. I still recall the first install I did of a Linux with Gnome (early version, IIRC it was the first Red Hat that shipped Gnome). It was an incredible change, and wildly impressive. Quite simply ,all other issues aside... Shouting down critics who suggest something you just don't want to hear rather than listening to their arguments is a rather poor approach to life; especially as a developer. I'm not making any claims of being a saint in that regard, but I've found most of the times I do it that I regret it. Finally... read the article again. I can state from experience that most of what he claims was an issue at the time. And that most of it has been fixed in a lot of ways since. Linux today is what it is because people like Miguel worked hard to improve things, and listen to what other companies, open source or not, had to say. Here's a thought: Spend the time to find everything that Miguel, Ximian, Gnome or anything else related projects have touched. Go ahead and uninstall them and see just how much you lose from Linux functionality. I still have a set of Slackware 3.2 floppies in storage somewhere... that's a nice taste of the days before we started thinking "Maybe unix needs some improvement after all."