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		microsoft is probably the most hated and reviled corporation in the world. yet it is also one few companies that has brought a lot of innovation to the computing world throughout the years (note: this commentary isn't going to be even close to unbiased [are any of my commentaries?] because i hold some interest in the wellbeing of microsoft by ownership of their stock). really, microsoft has probably been bashed ever since it first came out with the first incarnation of windows (i will admit it was copying macintosh's gui). i remember back in the mid to late eighties reading 'bloom county'/'opus' comics strips and seeing the �ber-geek bill gates deploying his latest software incarnation with disastrous results. microsoft has quite a pervasive presence in our culture, it has been parodied by the likes of both 'pinky and the brain' and 'the simpsons' and probably a whole lot of other less notable shows. world domination and microsoft just seem to go together in most people's mind. with its near monopoly over computer screens, how can people not think about and scrutinize every action that that company makes? but is a monopoly really all that bad of a thing? the standards that microsoft created with dos and windows made sure that anyone who had a computer could run the same software as any pc user can, and it also made it profitable for software developers to make software that would be usable by a large number of people by relieving the need to put in extra effort into porting their software for other systems. i personally think that microsoft has done the world a huge service with its standardization of the world (the world should be standardized, for more on hegemony look here). computers would be even more archaic, more confusing, and less "user friendly" if microsoft had not set itself on becoming the dominant operating system. the computing landscape would be like that of video consoles, with several competing systems each with some merits but also some/many downfalls. on a personal note i'm extremely pissed off that i jumped onto the n64 wagon instead of choosing the playstation because the system just sucks and there aren't any worthwhile games for it. so i'm personally grateful that microsoft is a monopoly because of the standards it has created and the positive influence. now many debate that microsoft sucks because the standards it created were crappy and they would say 'look at windows, what a piece of crap, it can't run anything, how is having the majority of the world's computers running that any good?' and to that i have to say that it's better than nothing and it's a whole lot better than a lot of things it could've been back in personal computing's formative years. and really how bad is the stuff it has done? buggy software: who makes perfect stuff?, crashing computers: people are simply stupid (almost all the time), limiting choices: the average joe often feels overwhelmed by choices, and so on. most of microsoft has done justifiable, not great but not horrible either. plus where would i be without microsoft? everything that has anything to do with this page has had a little bit of microsoft loving. i use ms word to do some writing and all my spell checking, notepad to code my html, ms paint to make do basic graphics stuff, ie to look over the product, and sometimes even command line ftp to do some ftp-ing. so kudos to microsoft for making the computer world a generally nicer place. i do sincerely hope that it will not be painfully torn apart by feds urged on by microsoft's bitter and squashed competitors (microsoft almost always simply makes a better product than the competition).