> Why do people use Internet Explorer or Outlook?

I dislike Outlook and used to use Eudora on Windows until I just started using my ISP's Web based interface (it's just so much easier when I check the e-mail from 3 or 4 different places).

As for IE, I use both it and Mozilla. I generally prefer Mozilla, but it actually seems to be *less* stable on my system (still sadly running Win98) than IE6. And some sites and obscure plugins just don't work correctly on Mozilla. But it's definitely maturing to the point where it's a clearly better choice. I suspect in 6 months or so I'll be using Moz exclusively.

> Why is Microsoft incompetent? That's a rhetorical question. A better question is, why do people USE Microsoft now that open source alternatives are available? The benefit of open source is that security holes (and, indeed, any kind of bug) like this get spotted and squelched much more quickly. And it is *impossible* for nosy corporations to put backdoors into their software and attempt to do stealthy sorts of things like upload hardware profiles back to the company.

I think it's unfair to blame MS entirely for having so many security holes; far more people are *looking* for security holes in MS' products, simply because they're so widely implemented. There have been buffer overflow bugs and other dangerous exploits in open software that have allowed bad code to be executed. Part of it is also Microsoft's security model for most home users -- defaulting to either a single user or all users as administrators is bad. Such an exploit is harder to pull on a *NIX because unless I'm running as root I can't kill my hard-drive.

> Why pay a skillion dollars for Microsoft Office, when you can download Open Office for Linux free?

I don't use Word at home anymore (I've been using AbiWord, which is nice and compact and suits my purposes fine) but I can see why businesses use it, having had to take advantage of some of its features at my work. The newest versions of Office are fairly well integrated with Visual Studio and creating macros and little VB programs to manipulate Word forms is pretty handy. In fact, that Word has a somewhat complex form handling system is fairly impressive.

It's far from perfect, though, and generally requires a lot of kludging to get to work correctly. I'm genuinely excited about the upcoming Office 11, with its XML-based form system (I design a lot of forms at work).

The other thing Office has going for it is that it is fairly easy to pull an Excel sheet into Word or Powerpoint and vice versa (actually, Excel is a pretty awesome program; definitely the highlight of the Office suite). Open Office and Star Office and their ilk simply aren't quite up to that level of maturity, though I agree for most home users they're certainly a great option.

> There is free accounting software,

Uh. Nothing that's up to the level of Quicken/Quick Books. I'm not aware of any really advanced free accounting/inventory management software.

> free image manipulation software,

But, uh, none that touch the stuff from Adobe. There's The Gimp, but it's nowhere as advanced and flexible as Photoshop 7 for doing more complex stuff (though, again, it's fine for casual uses). I'm aware of no free software that does vector-based graphics the way Illustrator does. Even Macromedia's rip-off programs (like Fireworks) are significantly more advanced than the open stuff.

> Some of this free stuff is less mature software than the commercial Windows counterparts, but open source software almost always ultimately surpasses its competition just because there are many more eyes looking at the code, and the developers who work on it are doing it because they want to, not because they have to put in the hours at a desk.

Can you cite examples where free/open products reached the level of maturity of the competing commercial products in realms that aren't related to software development? I think this is true in the realm of things programmers use, such as development tools and text editors. The fact that no free operating system has a GUI anywhere near the elegance of Windows 2000/XP or a window manager as nice as Mac OSX sort of speaks to this. Besides, a lot of useful applications (accounting software springs to mind) aren't likely to be fun to write or particularly useful to developers, and as such are sort of ignored by the open source/free software model. This isn't an inherently bad thing -- just I think there are some things better served by a commercial model.

Anyway, I don't want to be singing the praises of Microsoft, but I think they do produce some useful products (Windows 2000 is a pretty stable operating system, all things considered). And there really are legitimate reasons for using some of their other products.

BTW, Sam, have you looked into .NET at all? I'm not a programmer so I feel quite unqualified to comment on it, but a lot of programmers I know (who are admittedly Windows-type folks) are pretty excited by it as a development tool/model/platform/whatever-it-is-this-week.

Stephen