Nothing That You Didn't Already Know

(I must preface this with an apology to my friends who work at Micorsoft.)

Sometimes I wonder:
"Why do I dislike Microsoft? It makes good things. Windows XP is usable. The Xbox360 has at least one or two decent games. The Microsoft mouse and keyboard released in 2000 were pretty nice. I'm actually starting to like Office 2007 a little bit. Is Microsoft really all that bad?"

Then I remembered why I hate this company:
Excel = $192.99
Outlook = $87.99
Word = $196.99
Vista Ultimate = $179.99

Total price = $657.96

Does it really need to be priced that high? I understand that they need to pay their workers, invest in R&D and also make a profit, but is a text editor really worth $200?

All they're really doing is taking advantage of the fact that very few corporations are able to avoid Microsoft. It's the same pricing scheme as Adobe and other high priced software vendors. It makes me mad because I'd like to buy that stuff if it was reasonably priced. With Adobe, I don't have any choice. I don't know how many professional graphic artists use GIMP.

Also, Microsoft is incredibly stupid.

I was listening to TWiT 154 the other day and they were talking about the Mojave experiment which is Microsoft's Pepsi Challenge with Vista. The host, Leo Laporte, brings up an amazing point on why Microsoft shareholders should be terrified.

The average Internet user spends 30 seconds on a web page. To see how clueless Microsoft is: Go to MojaveExperiment.com and wait for 30 seconds after the video starts to play. Then close the website. What does Microsoft want the average user to take away from this PR campaign? "Zero"