What you posited was not that out of line. You did gloss over the alternatives. Now if MS were to disappear tomorrow or go out of business then it would be a different scenario.

I still don't understand why people prefer Outlook though. Pain in the butt to get used to. I finally started working at my first shop to use it and I am aghast at its limitations. Even in the 2003 incarnation.

Why does anyone have to "Imagine" a day without Microsoft? Just ask one of the many people who work without Microsoft every day. I used Microsoft's stuff for ten years, but I'd never go back to it.

Do you mean how many people use IE 6.0, or Outlook and Office 12? Versus Firefox 1.x, Thunderbird 1.x, or OpenOffice 1.x?

Far more people are using those products than every used MS 1.x products. In fact MS products were generally unstable until the 2.x and 3.x versions.

The first version of Windows people ever seriously used was 3.0 after all.

I took the challenge instead of just imagining it - both at work and in home and not just for a day but for one year (nearly). I took the challenge not because I hate MS, but to explore the alternative and face the world if it happens one day!

The result was very interesting and educative.

Back bone of the migration is SUSE 9.2, I could seemingly get the operating system and software installation. No problem there as YAST took care of most of the daunting stuffs. The pros I found in landing on SUSE's (or other linux distro) planet is - Customizable user interface (Tons of themes to choose from http://www.kde-look.org) and familiar/simplified menus. Instead of Start+Programs+Microsoft Office+MS Word? you go Kmenu+Office+Openoffice Writer?. The menus are organized based on its function/purpose and not on the vendor, which is very nice and easy to reach.
Our email service is POP3 based, facing it with thunderbird was very smiley. I could even install GNUPG and enigmail and sign my emails (very nice to show my boss and others). Next the network; Could get to work with "Novell client for linux"? but often disconnects. By creating a symbolic link to the network drive, I was more functional than in windows.
Openoffice replaced MS office apparently, which I already used in windows.
I see no major stopper for me to dive into non-MS world, but for some it may be a major step, but if you leap you can reach.

First of all, the argument that Firefox will grow more insecure as it becomes more popular just doesn't match the evidence. Firefox has been steadily gaining popularity over time, yet since early-to-mid 2005 the present known vulnerability count and rate of vulnerability discovery have shown a downward trend, not upward. Conversely, Internet Explorer has been slowly losing popularity, yet its present vulnerability count and rate of vulnerability discovery have been increasing.

Here's a graph that illustrates this. More charts and figures are available in my security summary.

Also, regardless of which browser has more vulnerabilities found, Microsoft has still shown that its development model is incompetent at fixing those vulnerabilities as quickly or as thoroughly as other browsers. Despite having many times more vulnerabilities than Firefox, Internet Explorer has fixed fewer vulnerabilities than Firefox has over the last year.

Remember that the open source Apache web server is by far more used than IIS and has been popular far longer than IIS, and yet IIS is demonstrably more insecure and is exploited much more often than Apache. Popular applications aren't necessarily more prone to attack than less popular ones.

In regard to stability, why would popularity have any impact on it?

It is a silly argument, if Microsoft went bust tommorow it wouldnt magically make all their products currently in use vanish, what would happen is that people would continue to use the Microsoft products they already had and over time there would be a phased transition to none-MS software, Apple would probably collect a chunk of the MS market but then so perhaps would Linux (if Novell or RedHat got its act together and made the Dells of the world a good offer). 5 years after the death of Microsoft you'd have an ecosphere that was a mix of MacOSX (or its successors), Linux or *BSD mixed in with now legacy and rapidly aging Microsoft products...10 years later it would be nearly all MacOSX, Linux or *BSD. The world wouldnt end. In all likelihood Linux would be the eventual successor to Windows (cheaper than MacOSX, better driver support for the most part than BSD and in terms of usage it already beats MacOSX and BSD cold). The software market would fundamentally change, with a more varied mix of operating systems in use (all with unix or partially unix roots) portability and standardisation would become the rule. MacOSX and Linux have demonstrated that you can have your cake and eat it already in terms of running portable software. Would things be better without Windows as the defacto standard operating system..who knows they'd certainly be different.

Let's just rephrase your question a bit, and I think the issue will clear itself up:

What if MS hadn't bought up or stolen all these existing products and put them under their brand name?

Answer: Things probably would have turned out much better.

Of course, that doesn't touch the products that have been killed by the monopoly.

Do you get it yet?

Please don't confuse the concept of 'many eyes make bugs shallow' with the truth that it only takes one set of eyes to look at a pile of garbage and recognize it as such. Brush up on the ... Anoyances books and start listing out the number of reported problems that take years to get solved, or are in fact never dealt with to see what MS does with the feedback of it 'billions and billions'.

Oh yeah, I have been Microsoft free for, hmm, 6 years? With 3 to 5 years before that I have to admit that I kept a partion around that had one game I really liked. So 10+ years of knowing that trying to do anything usefull was far more frustrating than any of the allternatives.

Or just go ask the folks at Ernie Ball just how essential Microsoft software is ...

"Brush up on the ... Anoyances books and start listing out the number of reported problems that take years to get solved, or are in fact never dealt with to see what MS does with the feedback of it 'billions and billions'."

Exactly! One little example that $#&!ed me off for years: When I was doing my dissertation back in 1996, using Word 95 (which was what Word 4 or 5, not exactly an early version) footnoting didn't work. This was a bug that at the time had been around for years and was well reported and complained about. How can you have a serious (and expensive) word processor that puts footnotes on a different page from the footnote number!? I don't know when they fixed the problem. It wasn't fixed in Word 97. Maybe they never bothered.

And all that nonsense in the original column post about standards and being able to being able to share Word documents. You are kidding us, right? I had to upgrade from Word 97 to Word 2000 because a collaborator used Word 2000. Now these two versions are supposed to use the same file format but try sharing a file with slightly complex formatting and you 'll know otherwise. Why do you think ODF is getting so much attention? If Microsoft had addressed the needs of users, no one would pay any attention to ODF. They don't give a #$@! about standards and never have.

Did some research on Word's footnote bug. Apparently existed since Word 2.0. I don't think anyone much used Word 1.0 for Windows as that came out around the same time as Windows 3.0 if I remember. Did it even support footnotes? Everyone was using WordPerfect on PCs back then. Anyway, problem existed through all versions of WinWord until Word 2000 and even in Word 2000 and later there are senarios in which the reference and footnote are split across pages according to word.mvp.org, see http://word.mvps.org/FAQS/Formatting/FootnoteOnDiffPage.htm.

And this is one of Microsoft's flagship products...After a decade and half of user complaints they still haven't fixed a basic feature so it works properly. Your argument about volume and testing is trash. Imagining what the world would be like without Microsoft is like imagining what the world would be like without McDonalds and the Big Mac.

Like a minority political candidate, alternatives bring attention to issues. Even the near monopoly Microsoft has greatly improved its product, albiet, bringing in features that already existed elsewhere.
Aside... UNIX/Linux is everywhere, from the MacOS, to (I guess) the proprietary innards of Windoze.

Like a minority political candidate, alternatives bring attention to issues. Even the near monopoly Microsoft has greatly improved its product, albiet, bringing in features that already existed elsewhere.
Aside... UNIX/Linux is everywhere, from the MacOS, to (I guess) the proprietary innards of Windoze.