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[Japo]

Originally Posted by Eagle of Fire

Even though it is quite obvious you're only trying to be an ass by stating ridiculous examples, I'm sure you would not want to maximize your income by ignoring disgruntles customers, moving your entire industry to poor countries where you can build your wares at 1/8 the prices at the cost of employee security and loss of jobs while selling the end product the same price or even higher to cover shipping at your home country and by completely ignoring anything else short of making profit with similar bad outcome.

Of course I would. And I know people in poor countries like it too when they can get a job, and they hate when the governments of rich countries make laws to prevent imports or outsourcing of manufacturing. And consumers will be happy if lower costs translate into lower prices. But I don't understand why you seem to imply that consumers aren't free to stop patronizing Microsoft, if they considered its products bad or too expensive.

The "disgruntled" users of Windows are divided into two groups: the ones who have tried alternative OSes and haven't liked them, and the ones who don't even want to try; of course all of you know there are alternatives, you just don't like them any better, on the contrary.

As for the programs included in Windows, of course recently US and specially EU governments have imposed restrictions on Microsoft to "defend competition" (punish economic success), as well as multi-million fines.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/ff606439

But the fact that Windows still comes bundled with less functional software than any Linux distro is actually related to its success--not as cause and effect, but as effects of the same cause. Windows was designed from the start as a platform for developers to make their applications as easily as possible, and it relies on them to provide those applications, instead of Microsoft alone. This paradigm works, and everyone knows the amount of software available for Windows (and nowadays .NET) is an order of magnitude higher than for any other platform. If you developed for Microsoft platforms you'd realize the huge amount of expensive assets and services Microsoft provides for free so that you develop for their platform, and how badly you're left out in the cold in comparison when you develop for any other. And end users don't realize it, but developers usually have the greater say on which platform will become widespread, since end users will also prefer the platform that has the greatest choice of applications.

It's ironic that the fact that an OS without applications is useless, means that the OS which comes initially bundled with fewer or hardly any application is the one preferred by most people (as much as they like to complain, just like they would complain of any other OS).