Rlent,
Don't take things so hard.
I am an open source guy myself, that is why I made the comment "time for a real operating system".
I believe that MS needs to be a little more progressive in their development of the operating systems and the applications than they have been. I am not all that happy with the resource managment in the core of Vista and don't like the security, especially with some of the need for directory services fragments. I do not in anyway like windows media player, it wiped my 5000 hours of audio and video off the face of the earth because of the DRM cr*p - I use iTunes.
But I have done enough support and managing of projects to know that Apple has had a problem of not moving forward quick enough with MS products. Look at how long it took them to get itunes straight for the windows platform. I worked on a project for a customer who had nothing but apple, what a pain trying to work with them. I am disapointed that they went to the intel system, I think that the motorola system was better.
As for the "sounds like more anti-competitive behavior to me" point, I got to say go through the Apple resellers program and see how much latitude you have in comparison to MS when it comes to pricing. No matter what anyone says, Apple has yet to allow the resellers to discount the products to make them competitive with the PC world unless they are large volume dealers. MS has pricing tiers and truthfully you can actually get a copy of vista for a lot less than retail but you can't with apple.
The other thing about Apple (now you got me rolling, he he) is it took them how long to embrace the developers? The need to keep things secret with all thier source code so to only have the ones who can afford to develop programs do so was the reason why they lagged behind. On the other hand, MS took the lead with this because of their efforts to work with developers early on. It wasn't the popularity of the operating systems that made MS the money and name, it was the access to the tools and code that allowed the hundreds of programs that ran on the operating system to be avalible to the public that did.
When they get a mapping program for Linux that really works, I will get rid of XP on this and use Linux.
Yep Open source.