> Why do people use Internet Explorer or Outlook? There have been more security holes in IE and Outlook than all competing software combined*. It's bad enough that a bug in IE or Outlook will crash the browser or spam people, but how's this for a goodie? In the past couple days, a bug in IE has come to light that will FORMAT YOUR HARD DRIVE.
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> 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.

To be fair, and as Stephen mentioned, a lot of it isn't that Microsoft just makes more bugs so much as there are *lots* more people looking for exploits in Windows than in LUNIX. I mean, ninety-eight percent of desktop PCs run Windows. So if you're trying to haX0r desktop PCs, it's a pretty stupid idea to look for backdoors in BeOS. If you catch my meaning.

Not that I hold Microsoft blameless. There was some sloppy work going on - and some stupid intentional design choices (enabling NetBIOS over TCP/IP by default, and binding TCP/IP to every network device? Swell idea).

The security holes are enough to drive me away from Outlook. I don't use IE simply because it isn't very flexible - I tend to dislike it when things have irritating features (like those evil page transition effects) that can't be disabled. Well, I don't use it because of that and because there's so LUNIX version. ;-}

> I know why some people don't use Linux -- although its window managers are coming along, making it less and less important that users of Linux be technically knowledgeable, Linux still has some work to do regarding how easy it is to set up a new system.

Not to seem a killjoy, but I installed Slackware 8.1 and Win98 on the same computer on the same day a while ago. For those who are unfamiliar with LUNIX, Slack is... not the frilliest, most newbie-friendly distro around. I think it's the oldest still-active distribution. But anyhow, the point is, the LUNIX install was dramatically easier than the Windows install. All of my hardware worked right out of the box (even the sound card!). Also, Windows was having large amounts of trouble recognising my HDD as 82GB - it kept saying 12. LUNIX had no such hangups.

My wife (who had never used a UNIX system before) was up to speed with LUNIX to the point where she could do perhaps a bit more than she could with Windows within a week. So I'm thinking the main problem is that Linux still *seems* scary and imposing and hard to use, rather than that it actually is. She did raise quite a stink about the switch beforehand, but once I convinced her to try it, she loved it.