Microsoft software just plain sucks

It's my turn to write one of these pages.  It needed to be said, I've put up with it annoying me in one way, or another, for many years.  I've used personal computers since before Microsoft was just a gleam in Bill Gate's eyes, I've seen much better, and worse, but usually much better.  It's my turn to write one of these pages.  Microsoft is not the be-all and end-all in personal computing, it's far from it.  Everyone should, at least, be aware of that.  At some stage in the future, Microsoft is going to have a general reputation for bad computing practices, as oil companies have for polluting the planet

It's marketed to people quite unaware of what's involved in using computers as if it were suited for them, but it's not.  It's a major irritation to use (its based on illogical methodology, and unexplained principles), and its extremely vulnerable to accident, misadventure, and abuse.  It's inexcusably unreliable (think of the millions that they earn from it—they can afford to do a better job, but don't).  It imposes unreasonable conditions on you yet accepts no responsibilities upon themselves (go on, read the various EULAs).  It sets out to subjugate everyone (the foisting of new proprietary, incompatible, often broken or terribly flawed, techniques for doing things into an environment that had well-established, reliable, widely-compatible techniques).  And costs far too much for what it is (not just that it's expensive, it's poor value for money).

Even when you don't use it, the actions of other people using it impacts on you negatively (the hoards of spam zombies, the technically illiterate who think that everyone else's computer works exactly the same as theirs does, the services that you want to use that insist on you using some particular Microsoft software, etc.).

If you write webpages, it can really make you grind your teeth.  All the good things that you'd like to be able to do, it still doesn't support, even after the competition has been doing it for years (transparent PNG image files [PNGs were developed circa 1996], quite a lot of CSS [circa 1996] used to style webpages, even HTML [circa 1997] used to write webpages, etc.).  So you end up dumbing-down what could be a well-done webpage, and/or filling it with gumph, just to suit Microsoft's Internet Explorer.  Or, you simply ignore it.

Yes, it's easy to bash Microsoft, there's just so many thing wrong with it.  And I have no problems justifying doing so, they don't try hard enough to make it better, and they actively make things worse.  Those that understand these things have spent years trying to get Microsoft to pull its finger out, but it falls on deaf ears.  They've been advised, there's even some forty-plus years of computing history to draw experience from, they just don't give a damn.  All that's left to do is advocate avoidance of Microsoft products.  Microsoft is the problem, not-Microsoft is the solution.  Linux is but one of them.

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