[inafield]

You're forgetting past history and the present times. It's not just Bill. IBM and Xerox before Bill Gates was worse. Apple now is far worse than Microsoft was in the "golden days".

Microsoft stole ideas, improved on them, and made them accessible to the public for far cheaper than anybody else. It wasn't just anti-competitive practices that put them at the front.

Apple stole ideas that others have done, improved on them, and made them accessible for a price HIGHER than everyone else because of marketing. It isn't just their anti-competitive practices that have put them at the front.

If you are going to make a claim to history and "you had to be there", then remember ALL of history and don't be condescending and assuming it was someone young that voted you down.

[username42]

I am not forgetting. Your comparison of Microsoft and Apple is unfair, I have another way to present it: "Apple stole ideas from laboratories and created a market for them. Microsoft copied successful market products to make them better integrated in windows and to sell them better."

The article http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/pops/pop7.4microsoftmonopolyf... gives irrefutable facts. Do not accuse me of rewriting the history. I was there to see the birth and death of many good products that have been killed by Microsoft tactics (dr dos, stacker, framemaker, borland C++, ...). One of my most usefull book at that time was http://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-Windows-Programmers-Micro.... Many people have lost a lot of time because of the monopoly of Microsoft. How much time lost because of IE6 ? I have lost a lot of time between 1999 and 2002 because visual C++ was not compliant at all with the standard published in 98.

My opinion is that all the time lost because of Microsoft has been detrimental to computer science progress.