> I don't own a Mac nor do I plan on owning one. Why? Because that would sentence me to purchasing products only from Apple itself and few other companies that it lets in on it license. Microsoft develops lots of stuff for PCs, but the great part is when some other fledgling company develops something really great that make more competition to improve the PC. The whole OS near-monopoly of Windows is what kept anyone else from really taking any of Microsoft's power, but people use Windows machines because of all the options out there for them. Conformity can be a good thing here.

Huh? Are you saying that Apple somehow prevents other companies from developing software for the Mac? The reason that Apple and MS are different in this regard is that PC _hardware_ is open ended and not controlled by one vendor (I believe it was Compaq who designed the first IBM clones, but don't quote me on that). As such, PC hardware is cheaper than Apple hardware, and it has led to the adoption of the PC in greater numbers than the Apple hardware. MS made some rather lucrative deals with IBM early on in the game and managed to get their DOS to be the standard (and eventually Windows). They have pretty much relied on predatory practices in order to stay on top and keep their monopoly since then.

Quite frankly, if a good software company had the OS dominance that Microsoft had, personal computing would be in a much better situation than it is today. DOS sucked and Windows continues to suck. Even MS realizes this -- note their creation of the NT brand, which is what will more or less replace the current Windows95/98/ME brand (along with all that other .NET hoo-ha).

Stephen