No, I don't hate Bill Gates. He is doing what everyone would do in a similar situation. Could I hate a man I envy? What I do hate is Microsoft products which aim at the lowest common denominator, the fact that Microsoft is deliberately ruining the software industry, and that most windowers don't realize it and are happy with Microsoft's mediocracy.

Living in Israel, I am particularly annoyed with Micro$oft, since they are doing their best to force right-to-left users (i.e., Israel and the Arab world) to use Windoze.

How for example? Well, they deliberately do not have RTL versions of Microsoft Office suite for OS X. No, this is not because it is hard to implement RTL (OS X had superb Unicode support), but because they don't want to risk losing customers who will, god forbid, buy systems other than Windoze. On the same token, which browser do you think is the only one on "OS X" not to support RTL? Correct, Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

And talking about IE, here is another example for how microsoft is keeping the industry behind (either deliberately, or due to their incompetency). The IE browser is the worst in terms of conforming to internet standards (e.g., XHTML and CSS). Every so often, I check my website on an IE, only to find that IE cannot handle standard markup which shows up perfectly well on all other browsers. This of course forces me to downgrade the quality just so that the IE surfers will feel alright. For example, my sciencebits.com website includes quite a few equations (rendered with LaTeX if you're curious). To increase their quality, I wanted to render them at higher resolution (higher than 72 dpi). Now all modern browsers know how to scale the formula images (i.e., perform proper anti-aliasing) and produce nice crispy images for the screen. Moreover, because the images are originally at higher resolution, the print version of the pages are of high quality too. Neanderthal browsers, like IE, don't know how to scale the images, they produce horrible looking "things". So, I had no choice but to compromise on quality.

Another problem arises because Microsoft develops (if you can call that developing) and sells website design software. As you would expect from Microsoft, it produced non-standard markup, i.e, html which can only be properly read by IE. Thus, many sites (too many in Israel) cannot be properly accessed by anything but IE on Windoze. I presume Microsoft's software does that deliberately, so that weak minded people will be forced to keep on using IE and Windoze. Either that or Microsoft is incompetent. Pick your choice.

So, if you're using IE, you should know that you are setting back the industry besides being prone to more security attacks (e.g., this article, or this one). You should at least try some other browser like firefox. You would be doing the industry a little favor.

Of course, Microsoft will never conquer me. I have seen the light. I use Mac OS X and Linux boxes. The latter are cheep and very effective (but require some unix'ing), while the former is sleek and simply unrivaled. (Have you seen Apple's new PC/Mac commercials?). It wasn't always like that. When Microsoft started, with MS-DOS, they were a refreshing improvement over their rival, CP/M. Too bad it is hard for giant companies to be innovative. Hard but not impossible!