"How dare the government intervene to stifle innovation in the computer industry! That's Microsoft's job, dammit!"

Microsoft has been portrayed as the evil big corporation so many times that it has become part of common knowledge. As per Goebbel's philosophy, a lie repeated from multiple sources will eventually become known as the truth. True, Mircosoft is a monopolistic corporation, but that's true of any big company. You do not build up such a big organization and then let anyone take a bite out of you. At the same time, Open Source does a good job of keeping Microsoft and other big companies on their toes. That said, it is wrong to hope for Microsoft's demise for they are solely responsible for many of the computing benefits we enjoy today. It is all right to bitch about how MS stole Apple's GUI concept to create Win 95, but that very act has been the reason why many people took to computers. If we were still in the age of command line DOS and Unix, computers would still be relegated to companies and universities. MS might create huge bloated software, but they also make things simple for most people. Ever tried installing a program on Linux? Ever tried to configure a printer on Linux? or even tried to install a flash plugin for Mozilla on Linux? You'll know what I am talking about. Even after decades of OSS, Linux has not achieved the ease of use that Windows 95 had (and neither has the ease of use of Mac OS X which was achieved in a much shorter period than either Windows or the Linux GUIs). While we still need Open Source to help innovate without the burden of patents and market constraints, we need corporations like MS and Apple(yes, really Apple is no different from MS, it's just smaller) to provide us with products that we can actually use without having to go to geek school.

[For humorous takes on MS and Open Source, visit Humorix ]