Hi, I remember reading "Wired" ages ago where they opined that Microsoft was "post cool" meaning that at one point it was the hippest place to work, but with stock options no longer the draw they once were, etc. and the fact that they'd fallen out of favour with the "bright young things" it was rapidly becoming the place that people went because they knew they'd get in, competition for places ceased to become an issue, the sting in the tail of course was that ultimately this ammouted to a dilution of thier "intellectual" capital, which for a technology company is a fairly serious matter. I'm sure MS are motivated by the $$'s but working in a bank, and following the markets like I do, I can assure you they're far more interested in making deadlines than making sure they ship a bug free product and meet market expectations. This is true of any producer in a comodity market, the bottom line is all that counts, especialy when you have a monopoly in the market, it's all about growing market share, and then expanding the market. Like I said, I am by no means a Linux cheerleader, My chosen OS is Sun's Solaris, which is not as scalable as it should be at present, but it's getting there, they currently have hardware for the telecoms market that promises better than five 9's uptime, and has hot swap everything, even processors and PCI cards! As for the anti MS crowd, I think you mistake what they're after, I was having this argument the other night with a mate after watching "the secret history of hacking" (which was cool becuase you had John Draper, (AKA "Captain Crunch" ) and Steve "WOZ" Wozniak talking about blue boxing and the Berkley homebrew computer club, etc. Amazing stuff!) Anyway, he said he couldn't understand why people hated Bill so much, when all he'd done was create (by initially reverse engineering/stealing) a very successfull product, (albeit because IBM "dropped the ball") and I'm not lieing here, if you check your history you'll find that PCDOS (which later became MSDOS) was built from reverse engineering QDOS (Quick & Dirty OS) which itself was an improved, though again reversed engineeered version of Gary Kildal's CPM, (the people IBM originally went to, only he was out rock climbing and his wife wouldn't sign the NDA :) This and the fact that he then had the gall to accuse the hobbists of the time of stealing "his" software, (the TV program even had the original letter :) is what started the whole thing. Bill pissed off the first geeks, and that antipathy towards both the man personally, and his software in general, has been handed down to each subsequent generation of the disperate tribes, as part of our collective cultural heritage. I'm on record as saying that Word is acually a very good program, I think that after word 2.0 it did everything you'll ever need to do, but it's good. What is not good, is the OS. From a purely technical level it sucks, and I'll tell you why. I have a 386 at home, made by a company now long since dead, it has a 40Mb drive in it, large by the standards of the day. it has 4Mb of main memory, and on this machine is MSDOS 6.22, Windows for workgroups 3.11 and a version of Office Pro, (4.2 I think) this all works beautifully, and all in 4Mb, with a 40Mb disk. Now compare this to the bloated & crufty monstrosity that is, or will soon be XP. The minimum spec of the hardware to run XP (without apps) is something like a 500-700Mhz processor, 64Mb of memory and a 1Gb of storage. If you want to run more than one app at once, then you need twice to four times the memory and much more drive space, not to mention more horsepower under the hood. Then there are the annoyances such as "change the gateway, reboot the system" Why?!? on any other system BeOS, QNX, Linux, Macintosh, you name it, you can just change the gateway and you don't have to reboot, why is this necessary with windows? Why when the default IDE driver screws up does it let you boot the machine but delete the CDROM and refuse to add it back in without a complete re-install of the OS. Where in this modern age is the MS verion of pre-empive multi-taking scheduler with decent memory protection for it's OS? Why is it always necessary to reboot to fix a problem, a reboot should be a tool of last resort in a production environment, but most data centers will reboot at the end of each week just in case, (unless of course you only have a few users, then you can go for up to a month) I could contunue, but I'm sure you take my point. Most of my tribe have very pointed technical reasons why they have low regard from MS's OS, though I sometimes think that the younger generation have confused ideas about why exactly we "hate" Microsoft. :) I'm not so sure about the "target" thing either, I think most people, (most geeks) are more interested in futhering the cause, than causing problems for MS, sure there are some of the crackers out there, (especially thier script kiddie bretheren) that are into that, but by and large Ms is far less of a "target" than you might imagine. Is Windows getting better? Perhaps, perhaps not, it's certainly getting bigger, and developing more features, but when cars start adding cup and plant holders you know that "innovation" has ceased and "fiddling" and "feature creep" rule. Don't get me wrong the equation editor in Word 6.0 is very cool, but I can't imagine may people will use it, given that the bulk of the accademic/mathematic community that I've ever met, (and I worked for both ESO, www.eso.org and ESA www.esa.int :) uses latex or TeX and dvips on some form of UNIX box to process thier papers for publication, conferences, etc. Though if you want to see evolution in action take a look at the kernel developers of the Linux crowd (www.kernel.org) and what they have running in the latest release, some of it is bloody amazing, firewire, USB, highly granular and scalable SMP, military level crypto, hot swap PCI support, etc. all for free, updated constantly and available on 14+ different processor achitectures at once. So, would I like to see the downfall of MS, yes, I would. But I want it to be at the hands of a better, faster more scalable and "free" ("think free speech, not free beer" - RMS :) OS. I want David to fell Goliath, I want to read of it the next day in the newspaper and think, "my side won, and I played a very small part in it" the Linux hackers do what they do to earn the adulation and respect of thier peers, and to ultimately prove that we're better at it than they are, that a bunch of oddball hackers cranking out code in thier bedrooms can equal and better, (in a fair fight) the products of the "best & brightest" that money can buy. This is nothing short of a crusade, a Jihad, it's been a long time coming, (almost 30 years) but we have all the time in the world, and no deadlines to meet. later jb