But the point is basically stained by similar prejudices; that drug dealers are bad because they attempt to get their customers addicted, and therefore a company that attempts to foster reliance on its products is equally bad.
Galt, there is a difference between reliance on a product because it does a task so well as to be indispensable, and reliance on a product because of unethical business practises, propaganda and built-in obselesence.
I can use myself as an example:
As can I.
I am currently 26 years old and have had about two dozen computers since I was a secondary school student, between personal ownership and professional responsibility. Some have been PCs with Microsoft operating systems. Some have been non-PC platforms (anyone else remember the ICL OPD or the Apple 2?). Some have been non-standard (a hand-built 68000 system with hand-written assembly, a 6502-based system with hand-built custom software and a hand-written RTOS, and a PC104 system). With the exception of the Win98 box I'm using now (it's not mine), all the machines I use now are running Debian Linux. Because, in my professional and personal opinions, it's the best available OS for the job.
I became sick of an OS that was unable to handle running continously, which couldn't multitask under heavy load, that was continously crashing, which couldn't be accessed remotely, and which cost
far too much while providing a tiny fraction of the functionality and stability of the software available on the other systems I was used to.
So I switched to a free version of unix called linux and never looked back, and I've never since met a problem I couldn't solve on linux. Which is something I could never say about Microsoft.
By the time I got into college and started buying my own computers I had so many thousands of dollars wrapped up in software (mostly games) that it would have been a huge waste of money for me to buy a computer that uses any operating system other than Windows.
I'll grant that windows is currently far better for running games - but frankly, if you're going to be running games on a PC, you're better off not doing any work on it, because of the induced instability in the platform.
What's more interesting to me than all of that, however, is why the current version of Windows needs a P4 running at a few GHz to work well, even if all you're doing is preparing a document in word - while I'm happily writing my thesis on a Toshiba Tecra 740CDT - which has an original Pentium 166 on it. I can't even
load any version of windows on that laptop, let alone do any work on it under windows!
In other words, why can't I do that in windows? Because of built-in obselesence.
I see nothing immoral about companies fostering such situations.
Nor do I, if they do so by providing a better mousetrap, so to speak - but they don't. Microsoft has had a
large number of lawsuits filed against it for unethical business practises. It's used propaganda and what's come to be known as FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) tactics, "Astroturf" campaigns, and it's even gotten the US state department to support it's business over other US businesses abroad.
Like I said, if their products were good enough, that'd be one thing. But they're not.
