I just love that the topic of Microsoft being the Evil Empire and purposely screwing customers can appear in just any forum on the internet. All these comments about MS are just down right wrong. I'm been a software engineer for MS for the past 5 years (in the Macintosh group, even I have issues with Windows). I bet anyone, if you could hang out in our offices for a week, you would change all your views about MS. Our office is filled with thousands of hard working techno geeks whose passions are creating great software and making customers happy. Do you think we would work 60-80 hours a week slaving in front of a computer to create a piece of crap software product? I don't think so. When we release a new version of our software, we begin crawling the internet for every review and set of customer comments we can find. Everything is compiled and forwarded to everyone on the team and the managers up the chain to Steve and Bill. We then have meeting after meeting of what we can do to improve the software. Never is there a meeting of how we can screw the customer, or plant some little program that sends all their email to us, or anything else people imagine Microsoft does. People talk about Microsoft as being a money hungry big corporation that is out to rob the pockets of computer users. HELLO!! What company doesn't want money? How can they survive without it? Take for example, the new Window ME. MS spent billions of dollars developing it. Now how many copies do you think we need to sell at $50 a pop in order to make back the $4 billion we spent to make it? Or how about my team. I work on Outlook Express for the Mac. Say we have about 30 people on our team. With salary, stock, bonus and benefits, MS probably shells out an average of $100K per person. That's $3 million a year. Throw in marketing and customer research and the number is probably around $5 million. Now how much do we make on the software? NOTHING! It's FREE!

That's it.. I'm getting off my Soapbox and shutting up. Just please believe me, Microsoft is not the enemy. Every time you feel like making a nasty comment about MS and have no data to backup your claim, remember your putting down thousands of hard working employees who dedicate their lives to making great software for Microsoft. Sure we make mistakes too, nothing is perfect.

Rob