Lord_Majestic - 6:24 pm on Oct 15, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm impressed. When I'm that high on crack, and I try to type, I break the keyboard.

Do you remember how software was in late 70s and early 80s? The industry was non-existant - IBM was calling the shots and hardware was the key. Software came as almost freebie with large hardware mainframe order, any techie that writes software to earn a living should be in a least small part be grateful to Microsoft for actually making software an independent and in some respect more important element of IT than hardware business.

And what about drivers? Anyone here remembers DOS days when printer manufacturers had to make custom drivers for different software products, so if you had something new you might not be able to print out? Driver model introduced in Windows completely revolutionized relationship between hardware and software - the OS was actually doing a lot of useful stuff which is forcing manufacturers write more or less generic drivers.

A lot of people kick Microsoft for wrong reasons - they sure did bad things and had bad OS releases from time to time (regularly in fact), but they certainly did much more good than bad - the only people who have real right to hate Microsoft are IBMers :)