I've never seen so many crashes and freezes in my life until I saw Netscape 6 on his box.

Yep. It took a lot to bother again to go back and look at Mozilla.

4.7 wasn't too bad, but still behind IE. Their solution to competing with MS was to release a product well before it was ready.

MSFT are certainly the market exemplars when it comes to this, but they are not alone. I think it became an institutionalized practice after the race between MFST and Novell to release Work/WordPerfect 6.

As for all the other stuff, I use MS products regularly, and just from a user level, Win2K treats me waaaay better than the Linux boxes I used in CS classes. I hated those things.

It's gotten much better, but I'd say Linux boxes still lag on ease-of-use and that they'd also be judged more harshly on feature-richness in traditional productivity apps. I'm actually a pretty non-demanding desktop user. I just want it not to crash!


1) reveal codes- wonderful feature that helps when you can't igure out what the crazy 'Word'-processor is doing

The fact that a word processor can rise to the #1 seller in the world without this feature (already present in the market) continues to astonish me (yes, good luck trying to divine some section breaks and such in Word). I think it says a lot about the success of MSFT's "suite" strategy, original pricing/licensing, and the grand promotion of suite-bound features like OLE that 98 persent of users never touched.