all humor aside, let me state that i am in very much in favor of a multi-OS society. when any one company gains absolute power over an industry, then it no longer has to answer to its customers. much like a teenager heading off to college...bad things can happen. i believe it was lord acton who said, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
take, for instance, phone companies. up until a few years ago, you had a choice between your local phone company or not having a phone. now, we poor customers have a choice. i chose to dump a land line and go purely cellular whereas others have chosen the voice-over-net route. this pissed off the phone companies to no avail, and they are still looking for ways to get their piece of the pie back.
another good example is the browser war. for years, netscape was the shit until microsoft launched a real browser with internet explorer 3. netscape slowly choked and faded away. other browsers popped up from time to time, but none could really gain any leeway. then came firefox.
firefox was released at the height of growing concerns over the security of internet explorer, and it is an excellent browser. leveraging plug-in technology, there is an ever growing assortment of add-ons; from the trivial and bizarre to the extremely useful. the introduction of firefox has forced microsoft to wake-up and do something about the issues in internet explorer.
a free market should be free. I am not fond of all the anti-trust crap that has plagued Microsoft for years, but I do believe the competition helps to drive their products to higher levels. As you can see in firefox, it does not take lawsuits to launch a better product.
i use firefox and plan to until something better comes along. if you don't, why not get firefox and check it out.
cartoon courtesy of www.theserverside.net.