Microsoft Flip-flopping on Virtualization License

Cole writes "Microsoft came within a few hours of reversing its EULA-based ban on the virtualization of Vista Basic and Premium, only to cancel the announcement at the last minute. The company reached out to media and bloggers about the announcement and was ready to celebrate "user choice" before pulling the plug, apparently clinging to security excuses. From the article, "The threat of hypervisor malware affects Ultimate and Business editions just as much as Home Premium and Basic. As such, the only logical explanation is that Microsoft is using pricing to discourage users from virtualizing those OSes. Since when is a price tag an effective means of combating malware?" Something else must be going on here."

It's obvious

This is clearly Microsoft suffering a managerial battle of the wills. One half wants to bow down to pressure to reverse the EULA ban on virtulization, while the other half is strong opposed to relenting.

I suspect (hope) that desperation with the lack of popularity of Vista will force Microsoft's hand.

Re:It's obvious

That would be tricky for MS to pull-off but they could just make it very difficult for certain applications to run on Windows. Require a certification process, implement technical measures to authenticate the applications and then use the DMCA to destroy anyone who dares to bypass the protection by using fake credentials.

Make it nice and expensive to obtain the credentials, or just use a clever licence agreement and that'll certainly stop the pesky open-source kids from meddling. The best thing is, if the DoJ decide to take an interest, MS can tell them that it's necessary for security.

I really can see Windows going the same as some console platforms. Either you make your software with permission or you don't do it at all.

UAC for management

You are changing the EULA of your latest product. cancel or allow? :-)

Re:It's obvious

This is clearly Microsoft suffering a managerial battle of the wills. One half wants to bow down to pressure to reverse the EULA ban on virtulization, while the other half is strong opposed to relenting.

So each half is doing a non atomic operation and since each party is working independently of the other and they are constantly interrupting each others non atomic decision making process schizophrenic statements ensue. Correct me if I am wrong but that's a type of race condition isn't it?

Re:Size Matters?

Which, (assuming sarcasm on your part), wouldn't rule out the virtualisation restrictions being a contributory factory in to poor vista sales.

Certainly. However, I think it's safe to assume - as my sarcasm intended - that EULA-limited virtualisation is only something a tiny minority of users would take into account.

(Especially since a quite reasonable interpretation of the EULA doesn't prevent you from, say, virtualising a copy of Vista on your Mac running OS X - ie: the most common end-user virtualisation scenario.)

I think we can take the poor sales as a given - if vista was flying off the shelves, MS wouldn't trouble with a "fact rich" campaign to persuade potential customers to "proceed with confidence". Whether or not sales is the same thing as popularity is another question, although Microsoft fans don't usually have a problem with the notion when contrasting Windows against Linux.

As with Office, Microsoft's biggest competitor to Vista is Windows XP. Vista sales are slow not because it is "bad", but because XP is well and truly "good enough". Hence, the take-up rate of Vista is basically that of new/replacement PC sales.

But let's not get sidetracked. Even if virtualisation isn't causing Vista's sales problems, it could still be seen as doing so, internally. For that matter, if MS were going to relent a little on the more controversial features of Vista, they're more likely to give ground over virtualisation than they are to back pedal over DRM, for example. And there's probably nothing they can do at this late stage about the hardware issues. So if they were inclined to throw the potential buyer a bone, it would pretty much have to be over virtualisation.

Not really much of a bone. The proportion of customers such an annoucement would sway is miniscule by any reasonable argument. I don't think even the craziest of sales droids believe that a meaningful (hell, even statistically valid) portion of their userbase is holding back because of perceived problems with virtualising certain versions of Vista.

I'm not sure I fully understand the article

but could this just be Microsoft trying to squeeze yet more dollars of profit out of everything they can (i.e. now virtulization)?

Why bother?

There is very little that I need to do that can not be done natively in Ubuntu, and for those not in the know, Ubuntu is completely free. So why would I bother buying/downloading ANY version of Windows and even bother installing it, either natively or as a virtual machine? I just don't get it.

Re:Why bother?

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office XP installs out of the box when you doubleclick setup.exe in Ubuntu (Wine comes with Ubuntu). Microsoft Office 2003 requires you install a few things first because Microsoft didn't include it with the installer like they did for Office XP. Such as MSXML and a few other components.

The completely entirety of Adobe Creative Suite (that includes Photoshop).

I know the older versions work fine (alternatives to Photoshop though do exist, like Krita, which is closer to the Windows version of Photoshop and The Gimp, which is closer to the OS X version of Photoshop).

3DSMax

Apparently it doesn't run too well under wine, however there are alternatives like Maya (non-opensource alternative, just like you wanted) or Blender (once was closed-source software).

FL Studio

FL studio has gold ranking in the Wine application database, so no problems there.

Fine Reader

Not only have I never heard of that application, but nor has Wine's application database... A quick look on Google results show me a RSS reader... There are plenty good alternatives to those.

Disclaimer: I run Windows XP and have Ubuntu setup for Apache/PHP testing (production server on CentOS).

The fact you run only servers with Linux shows, it's quite apparent you have no knowledge on running those applications under Linux.

Re:Why bother?

It seems that the only thing you can do on Ubuntu that you can't do on windows is troll slashdot...

Since when is a license needed?

Only if you believe that EULAs are enforcable.

Market Segmentation

Artificially introduced market segmentation.

Seperate the user base by requirements. To match a low, medium and high priced product range, when there is no real difference between the actual products other than artificial restrictions.
By specifically disbaling certain features from the low versions, power users (the few who will touch Visat with a bargepole), will be forced to empty their bank accounts for the high version (Vista Ultimate/Business), otherwise they may just buy the version which could do everything they required (which would be cheaper).
Less revenue for Microsoft.

This is similar to the recent debate over MS Visual Studio Express vs. Professional. The former's EULA disallowing plugins of some variety which actually loaded fine. This forced users to buy the uncrippled version for actual development. More money to MS.

Re:Market Segmentation

Uhhmmm, your point? This is done by almost every company out there, including hardware companies (no, once the yields are good that low end cpu is no different from a high end one except for being factory clocked lower).

What do you prefer, that every copy cost more than the medium priced version does now? That people who can't afford the product not be able to buy one with only the features they USE for less?

DUPE!

This was already mentioned yesterday: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/20/064324 1 [slashdot.org]

Stoppit with the different versions!

I've bought the software (note - this is a lie; there's no way I'm going to buy Vista any time soon). Microsoft has made their money. They should stop telling me how I can use it.

This is why I like free software. I'm treated as the owner.

Price Tag

Since when is a price tag an effective means of combating malware?

When it makes people switch to Linux.

No kidding.

"Something else must be going on here". No shit sherlock.

The thing that's going on is market segmentation [wikipedia.org]. To put it briefly: Microsoft reckons that those customers who are likely to want to run Vista in a virtual environment have got the money to buy a more expensive version. It's the exact same principle as is used for pricing some commercial databases according to "number of CPUs in the system which is going to be running it" - anyone who's got the money to buy and the need to run a 16-processor system can probably afford to spend more on the database, regardless of whether there's any technical difference between the 16 processor version and the 8 processor version of the software.

Re:No kidding.

"Something else must be going on here". No shit sherlock.

The thing that's going on is market segmentation [wikipedia.org]. To put it briefly: Microsoft reckons that those customers who are likely to want to run Vista in a virtual environment have got the money to buy a more expensive version.

If it was that simple, Microsoft wouldn't conflict itself so much. There are many more things going on, not the least of which, is the virtualization on the Mac (not a core Mac user myself).

Mac+OSX has still many disadvantages on its own, the biggest of which is vendor support for software and games. Parallels integrates relatively seamlessly virtualized Windows into a Mac.

Under virtualization, you really don't need more than Vista Home, since you can't run Aero anyway, so people would naturally flock to that. Many PC owners are willing to switch to Mac today, as long as they have a seamless Windows experience, which they still need.

Microsoft isn't just trying to make a buck, they're trying to decrease the rate of Vista/Windows virtualization. The problem here is: they can't change the license of XP which is out there already and people run that on their Macs.

So the conflict (at least part of it) is: forbid virtualization on cheap Vista (and thus stiffle Vista adoption as people run their XP on Macs), or allow virtualization since XP already allows virtualization anyway.

And only after all those strategy issues are resolved, comes the question if Microsoft could make more buck with expensive virtualizable Vista: corporate customers usually need to virtualize Windows for testing. But they don't really need a ton of copies for that purpose. A 1000 employee company may need just 5-6 licenses for the 5-6 developers who specifically need to do testing of their software. Hence the buck making potential isn't really quite there.

because

Since when is a price tag an effective means of combating malware?

Well, it does mean that there are only 5 potential victims for your malware :P

Losing their platform

The reason Microsoft wants to keep the cost high to virtualize Vista is because they want people to actually run Vista as the main os. When lots of people start running linux (or parallels on macs), they are using Vista simply as a bunch of libraries to run one or two apps.

They want to remain in control of the platform, if people use mac or linux as their main os and use Windows to run one of those not-yet-supported programs the power of Microsoft wil start to degrade...

Apple doesn't even give you the choice

Microsoft gives you at least a (costly) option. Apple (correct me, if I'm wrong) doesn't.

And no, I am not a MS fanboy. I've been using Linux for more then ten years almost exclusively. Lack of hassle with licensing issues being one of the reasons for my choice of OS.

Re:Apple doesn't even give you the choice

Microsoft gives you at least a (costly) option. Apple (correct me, if I'm wrong) doesn't.

True-ish, and Apple certainly can't chuck any bricks in that particular greenhouse. However, there are a couple of mitigating factors:

1. Apple do not have a 95% monopoly of the desktop market. If you don't like Apple's policy, vote with your feet (sounds like you already have). OTOH the group who are disadvantaged most by MS's policy are those who don't like Windows and are trying to switch to Mac or Linux but - because of the MS software monoculture - can only do so if they still have a way of accessing Windows.
2. The issue of virtualising OSX is in a chicken-and-egg state - I don't know if VMWare or Parallels support EFI (needed by OSX) or support OSX's graphics requirements (of course, no one reputable will admit to having tried it).
3. I don't think there's a huge market for it (once you dismiss the "I want to try OSX on my PC" brigade) - the big demands for windows-hosted virtualization come from the developer and server consolidation markets. The Apple world doesn't have the huge army of in-house developers that buy VMWare Workstation , and I'd guess that OSX Server is used predomniantly for high performance file sharing, render-farming etc. - not the sort of things you virtualize. The money in OSX-hosted virtualization is from users who need to run Windows. (Cross refernce with above point). I'm guessing they only support other non-MS guests because they were already supported by their existing windows-hosted products.

If Apple doesn't sort this out soon they're going to start hacking off developers - virtualization is so darn useful. This will come to a head when 10.5 is released and betas of 10.6 go out and developers have to juggle past, present and future major versions of the x86 based OS - but the initiative will have to come from developers, via Apple - Parallels and VMWare have no strong incentive to break a sweat over it.

P.S. Also bear in mind that the last thing Apple want is, officially or otherwise, a "try-before-you-buy" route for OSX: even if the implementation was non-flakey, the first impression of playing with a new OS is always frustration because of the differences and the fact that your instinct is to plunge into "clever stuff" rather than work through the basics. Better if you are sold on the idea by an evangelist, part with cash, and have a $2000 incentive to get over having to press the fricking pretzel key instead of "ctrl".

Microsof is right

Bad things can happen when you virtualize. Corporate users understand this and moreover have their own IT people to support this. On the other hand if end users virtualize Vista basic and then face problems they will be burning up the Microsoft support lines and pretty soon the amount spent on support will be more than the cost of the basic edition. Given this scenario MS has two options - price all versions the same as premium and build in the cost of extensive support into the price or have separately priced versions with a cheaper version for people who just want to net surf . I believe MS is doing the right thing by having a cheap version which they restrict so they dont have to provide a lot of support and hence can afford to sell cheap instead of pricing everything expensively just so a few cheapskate nerds who want to virtualize but are too cheap to buy the expensive version will not badmouth them. Besides why not just Linux KVM if you are into virtualization. Except for the virtual shared memory Vista Virtualization has virtually (pardon the pun) nothing which Linux doesnt have.

Re:Microsof is right

Your post would be valid if Microsoft actually gave free technical support with their OSes. However, this is not the case - usually a for-fee trouble ticket is required for anything beyond activation key issues.

The Mac Threat

From TFA:

Cynics say that this is Microsoft's way of punishing Mac switchers, while Microsoft calls it a "security" issue.

Microsoft isn't stupid, and they can see the writing on the wall. Switchers pose a problem for Microsoft, because most anecdotal evidence and many studies show that switchers don't switch back to Windows. Now before you bash me as an Apple fanboi, consider this: most people who leave Windows are looking for an out due to frustration. Even if you think Mac OS X is inferior to Windows, someone looking to get away from Windows might not be the most objective person in the world. Apple's plan is to get people to switch, to just taste OS X, and then count on them not going back to Windows. Intel Macs make it "safe" for users to try it, because they can always fall back to Windows if OS X doesn't work out for them.

The most ridiculous part of the MS strategy, though, is to assume people pay attention to the EULA anyway. I recently installed XP on my Intel Mac on to a boot camp partition. Parellels is smart enough to see the boot camp partition and run in VM mode. Is that "illegal"? Will Microsoft come kick in my door? Would I be able to do the same thing with Vista (probably) even though the EULA states I can't?

Re:The Mac Threat

The thing your missing is that most people don't consider switching until they've already decided the replace their current machine. At that point, spending the $$$ for a Mac isn't really any different from spending the $$$ on a new Windows box except that with the Mac, there's the chance that they may not be as frustrated with the OS as they are with the current machine. If if doesn't work out, then they can simply load windows on their Mac and they're no worse off (except that they've explicitly paid for windows...but it seems to be a price they're willing to pay for the chance to get away from windows).

People who are savvy enough to know that they can migrate their current machine to Linux aren't really the people that MS is afraid of leaving (they've already lost them or kept them, depending).

A few lines of Wisdom

Mac OSX Home Basic 129$
Mac OSX Home Premium 129$
Mac OSX Business 129$
Mac OSX Ultimate 129$

Ubuntu Home Basic 0$
Ubuntu Home Premium 0$
Ubuntu Business 0$
Ubuntu Ultimate 0$

A both OSes have home versions which allow restore of backuped Data...
For Vista you need Ultimate or Business to get restore functionality ;-)

Malware

Since when is a price tag an effective means of combating malware?

I imagine it can actually be effective in combatting some forms of malware. If only 10% of users buy the high-priced version, only 10% would be vulnerable to any malware targeted at it. This would make it much more difficult for malware to spread, especially the sort that spreads from one infected machine to another.

Lame

From TFA: "For its part, Microsoft says that hypervisor rootkits are a serious threat to virtualization, and they could be right."

Surely, they don't mean to suggest that hypervisor rootkits stop being a threat as soon as the user ponies up the additional $210 or so for a Vista Ultimate edition?
Come on, M$, take your time and try to come up with a better excuse than that! Saying ... oooh hypervisor rootkit!!! ... won't fool any of the guys who know enough to employ virtualization.

Once virtualization is criminalized...

... only criminals will have virtualization.

Didn't MS say someting about the security issues of hardware virtualization? Hello? Haven't they hard of Blue Pill? Can someone explain how an EULA can keep malware from attacking a system? (And yes, I know that Blue Pill isn't a real threat... today.)

DRM Thing?

Not even the Ultimate License allows you to watch/play DRMd content in a virtual machine. It is impossible to technically restrict what can be done with content as soon as it is played in a Virtual Machine. Audio is especially easy to make perfect digital copies of, even if it is DRMd.

Allowing home editions of Vista to be run in Virtual Machines would essentially make the DRM protection in Vista useless.

Let 'em shoot themselves the foot

My current assignment is with a server consolidation team. One of the things we are doing is reducing the number of servers and virtualizing everything we can. If we can't virualize MS Windows to reduce hardware count then in the future Linux will be the platform of choice for servers. All the major players have Linux versions of the server software I use - databases and web based servers are the majority of corporate servers today so when I design systems I don't even consider a Microsoft based solution. Scalability and security are the main reasons. The Microsoft solution is to throw hardware at a problem requiring more licenses and more expense to the data center at all levels. Since Java runs everywhere, although I prefer other languages, WebSphere and WebLogic are the major players along with Apache for web based applications. Any database I need runs on any UNIX and some Linux distros. So I have no need to fight the PHBs who eat Microsoft FUD for breakfast when I can point to, in this case, millions of dollars in annual savings when they dump every server running Microsoft and never put another one in the data centers.

So leave Gates and Co alone. I don't want them to allow virtualization. It will make my job a whole lot easier.

The real reason

Virtualizing the cheap versions is a big problem for MS.

Anyone who wants to virtualize obviously has another OS they like. The cheap Vista versions limit features to the point of uselessness: they're there to be sold to OEM's cheap, to let MS advertise a low entry price, and to encourage users to upgrade.

Virtualizing Vista Home would let me have a "real" copy to play with and test stuff on, with no limitation since I have the (almost always better) facilities of another OS available. No motivation to upgrade -> no reason for Vista Home to exist. For my purposes Vista is easy enough to install that there's no real need even to activate it, just don't keep any important data there.

The fact that they care at all about this suggests that there are a lot of people who might be interested in virtualizing Vista. Maybe because they want/need to play with it but realize it's nowhere near ready to be a primary OS yet?

DRM?

I asssumed that the reason they want to limit virtualization is that it becomes realitively easy to remove DRM from anything when the OS is virtualized, because the host OS can capture and record whatever "pipe" comes out of the virtual environment. DRM is key to MS vendor lock-in and domination of media markets. Particularly with the OS level DRM integration in Vista.

shady marketing technique

the bottom line here is that recent innovation in marketing - the selective license. "So how much does it cost?" "That depends. How much money do you have?" If you really had a choice, would you do business with someone like that? Of course not.

The real truth here is that they want to charge you more money if you are virtualizing because they know you either have more coin if you are running a VM (most likely an intel mac) or that you are not going to be a long running customer. (most likely running linux emu)

imho this pricing model should be illegal. Products should not be sold based on how valuable it is TO YOU, but how valuable it is on its own merit. Product price should not be allowed to be based on how much money you have to spend, that does not affect the actual value of your product. It's no different than price-gouging based on scarcity in a region. The only thing that keeps this practice in check normally is law of supply and demand, but with software you have a legally supported monopoly so that doesn't help.

Linux is the same way

The virtualizable version of Linux costs 2 and 3 times as much as the non-virtualizable version of Linux. Additionally, Linux has a restriction that each copy may only be running on one machine or disk drive at a time.

Just lost a sale

This is funny because I wasn't going to buy a version of Vista at all.

But when I saw MS was going to let you virtualize the lower rung I changed my mind. I was going to load a purchased copy in my Mac. Changing their mind lost my sale.

Oh well.

Exceptions for software testers?

This is the first I've heard of this EULA restriction, and it begs a question. Software developers often use a virtualized environment for far, far easier testing of their software on multiple platforms. Do they get a different EULA that allows them to run the low-priced editions in a VM? If they're making consumer software, it would be awfully silly to deny them that convenience or force them to test on a Vista edition that few of their customers would use. Maybe you get a completely different license if you get Vista through MDSN? Which would legally mean, I presume, that a small-time developer who didn't want to pony up for an MSDN subscription and just bought a couple Vista editions at his local store would still not be allowed to virtualize for testing?

IE7

What I'd like to see is an extremely cheap version (even free?) with IE6 and IE7 pre-installed. Nothing else apart from Flash and Windows Media Player (and the ability to install, say, Quicktime).

Web developers (developers, developers) without a Windows box cannot test websites for IE. And given IE's track record with standards compliance, this is not a good situation for Microsoft. I'm not buying a whole Windows box just to test websites in their crummy browser.

Desperate to see this one in court

Prosecution: he installed this OS in an unauthorized fashion, prohibited by the EULA.

Defense: Once he has bought it, you cannot tell him what to do with it.

Prosecution: He didn't buy it, he licensed it.

Defense: He went into a shop, paid for a disk, and has no further obligations. If that's not buying, what is? Do you think he also licensed his copy of War and Peace that he bought in the same store at the same time on the same card?

Prosecution: And, we claim damages....

Defense: Damages for what? He bought it, he installed it, he used it. Can a book publisher collect damages because I use my ordinary glasses to read it with instead of buying a new pair as stipulated in the Eula?

Well, it would be a fun case to see.

Virtualizing makes low-end Windows a Unix app

The low-end Windows exists to lock other software out of the PC. It's almost free compared to retail Windows, you Microsoft works very hard to make sure you can't get a PC without it.

However, if it can be virtualized legally, then a Unix operating system installer can be prepared which runs on a stock Windows PC and when it's done your PC is running Unix, Firefox, and a PC virtualizer with your original Windows inside there, running without compromises. Since people don't understand what the hell and OS is and don't want to, you can sell it as a security upgrade, which it is. On an 8-way CPU you could give Unix 4 CPU's and Windows 4 CPU's and it may be much more efficient also while software catches up with multicore, each may still be as fast as if it had all 8 CPU's to itself.

Nobody wanted to kill Mac OS 9 more than Apple, and they still had to virtualize and it still took them forever. It is obviously the only way forward because an application platform doesn't come into being overnight. However with the maturity of today's PC virtualizers and Firefox you can actually make the transitional period better than what people are going through now with Windows Vista. If you run a Vista installer on an XP system you can end up without sound or with some apps not working. If you run the theoretical Unix installer from above you end up with the same Windows features as before as well as additional enhancements.

Re:Hmmm

Personally, I am more inclined to the creed of being free to do what you want as long as you don't interfere with someone else's freedom.

I know that this world is going more towards "forbid everything but the bare essentials someone needs to be good for the company and country", but that attitude is behind everything that was wrong in this part of the world about 70 years ago.

Greetings to Godwin, btw.

Re:I just don't get you guys...

You lost me at "As the senior IS manager for my company with duties running from web development to full network administration" ... any MANAGER doing all these duties is either (a) a shitty-ass manager who can't maintain staff longer than the time it takes to piss them off each day, or (b) a shitty-ass developer/admin who smarter people than you pushed into management with the hopes that you'd never again develop software or administer a network (they failed).

Either way, your an asshat.

That aside though, because I've got a brief spot of downtime in my workload, I'll even answer your points more legitimately (even though I've already summed it all up perfectly well)... and before I do, I'll tell you I basically like Windows, XP anyway, and am not a huge fan of Linux (never seems to work right for me no matter how much time and energy I put into it)...

1. I agree, I've had virtually no trouble with XP for a few yeas now. I can't even remember the last time I saw a BSOD, or any crash I couldn't directly attribute to a single application. I also agree that if you maintain your machine with any semblance of brains, this stability will likely continue indefinitely. I further agree that in my experience, I've had just as much trouble in terms of stability with various Linux distros than I've had with Windows, in fact more so.

2. Declaring that *nix "geeks" are the virus writters on Windows is pretty stupid. In fact, knowing some people as I do, I'd go so far as to say that very few malware writers are doing so to make Windows look bad and *nix look good. VERY few.

3. Not to be a defender of Mac's, because I don't honestly have a ton of experience with them, but ... "If I go Mac I cut down my productivity by at least 1/2 in a business environment..." Why? Most business users have frankly very limited, well-defined needs which can be met perfectly well on a Mac. OpenOffice will take care of most of it actually. Add Firefox/Thunderbird and a few other solid pieces of software and 99% of what they need is covered. "...it would sit like a cold stone, never on, at home because there isn't shit for software for it when compared to PCs..." ... Well, again, most typical home users would find 99% of what they need available on a MAC, unless your referring to games, which is the only place your comments stand.

4. "If I go *nix in any flavor it gets even worse. Unreliable and disparate code bases open in the wild for all to see and modify..." ... err, that's kind of the whole point. Your right, there are some terrible open-source code bases out there, but for all the troubles I've personally had with Linux, that's not one of the poor code bases. Neither are the major open-source projects like OpenOffice, Firefos, GIMP, etc. These are fantastically good projects with solid code bases, there's just no denying that.

5. "...limited choices for software in any class or type..." ... Just just absolutely false. There is a plethora of choice in virtually any category you can name. Oh, I'll grant you a lot of it isn't very good, but that's true of Windows too. I absolutey defy you to name more than one category or need that you can't find a suitable open-source app for. You *may* come up with one, even that's hard to believe, but not two or more, I guarantee that.

6. "...hardware limitations..." ... Haven't been keeping up with the state of Vista, have you? I've had as much trouble as anyone with Linux hardware support (why the hell can't I, even with Fedora Core 7, get my Altansic L1 NIC to work?!?), but Vista is almost as bad. Anything before Vista has had a lot of years to develop, so it's not a completely fair comparison.

7. "Interoperability withe the bulk of the PC centric business world is low on the user end to boot." ... Really? I deal with people all the time who are 100% Linux-based and I can't remember the last time they couldn't

Re:I just don't get you guys...

If I go Mac I cut down my productivity by at least 1/2 in a business environment and it would sit like a cold stone, never on, at home because there isn't shit for software for it when compared to PCs. And it's more expensive to boot with less hardware options. No thanks.

This is a joke, yeah? I mean, productivity reduced by 1/2? Have you actually used a Mac?

I work with a Mac in a business environment, as do many other people I know in different companies. Mixed environments that include Windows. Most Mac users find they're more productive on their macs - things "just work", there is more consistency in application interfaces, apps don't crash as often, and generally the whole experience is more enjoyable. As developer machines, they are superb. Many developers I know have moved from Windows or Linux to them.

As for software, apart from games there is just about everything anyone needs for business on a Mac. We use Microsoft Office, we have Keynote, Pages, Adobe products galore. The OS uses open standards for communication, so we're able to send and receive stuff from Windows users and generally have no difficulties. And as said, we're more productive.

I read a bit more in to what you are saying. You're limited in your abilities - you can only work on Windows and never bothered to learn other operating systems. As such, new things scare you. You won't have as much control - in fact, you won't be the "expert" any more. Can you spell "job security"?