[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.