1) You and I should really sit down and talk. Really really. Drop in to CCD any one of these days (after this week) where Swaroop and I work, and we’ll make a Microsoft-bash session out of it you’ll be proud of.

2) You gotta style this text box. Courier New is like, 1999 man!

3) Your product reviews point – it is expected of a software company to pay attention to their premium software. Paying customers should get better software than non-paying customers. Regardless, nothing excuses IE.

4. Your piracy point – Microsoft may be a lot of things, but stupid it is not. They understood the merit of forging good partnerships, which is what they did. Their catch line from day one? “We make the software your hardware needs”. They’re a marketing company “now”, but they used to be a software company. Don’t take anything away from Win98SE and Win2000. They were solid operating systems. Better than anything else at that time.

4) Your security point – Microsoft is a victim of its own popularity and practices. People crack Microsoft products because they want to stick it to the man, and because they can. Also, they know that whatever they do, will reach out to the majority of the market. I’m not bringing Unix based OS’ in this, because they are inherently secure, and aren’t attractive to crackers because it won’t result in anything.

The security cracks we see are the ones which are public — they have a malicious intent. I’m sure people are cracking Linux and OS X everyday, but they are the ‘real’ hackers, who do it for their own satisfaction and knowledge — and responsibly don’t release it to the public. You need to understand the difference in crowd to understand why it works the way it does.

— That was more than a couple of things, but you touched a topic right after my own heart