I'm Not Anti-Microsoft, Am I?

I was chatting with an acquaintance from the “wiki”:http://www.hrwiki.org tonight and he said something in passing about me being against Microsoft. From my website he saw that I’m not fond of IE, and assumed (understandably so) that I must be equally opposed to all things Microsoft. I suppose I should set the record straight.

Honestly, IE is one of the only things about Microsoft I don’t like. I tried “OpenOffice”:http://www.openoffice.org once, but it seems to hog resources and it lacks the robustness of Microsoft Office (though I did like the “Save to PDF” option). Office just works, and it works well. I might be persuaded to try OpenOffice again when they’ve banged some of the kinks out, but right now I’m perfectly happy with Office.

I’m a huge fan of Windows XP, and I’m looking forward expectantly to Longhorn (though I’m not happy about the integrated browser bit). XP is a stable (albeit insecure) operating system, and it has a lot of great features. I’ve honestly considered a switch to Macintosh ever since they moved over to a Unix-based core, but I would have to replace all my hardware, and everyone knows Mac hardware isn’t cheap. I’ve tried a few different flavors of Linux before, but none of them has seemed as put-together as Windows. They all remind me of Frankenstein’s monster. I’ll hopefully be getting a laptop in the next couple months, and I am planning to partition my drive for Linux (if anyone can recommend a good flavor, please comment). Even so, I’m sure I’ll keep XP as my primary OS.

So, there you have it. Yes, I’m vehemently against IE. Microsoft is certainly not without it’s flaws, but they do make a number of good products and they deserve recognition for that. In fact, they haven’t been entirely without merit in the browser world. It was because of better standards support (circa 1999) that IE won the browser wars in the first place.

My final point is this: please don’t assume for a second that I use [Firefox] because of some preconceived distrust or hatred toward Microsoft. The last thing I want is for anyone to walk away from my site thinking Firefox is for people who hate Microsoft. I use Firefox for one reason and one reason only. *It’s simply a better browser*.