RE: Oh dear

"MS hardware has always been second to none, they have been at the front of design and reliability, in 10 years ive had 2 MS mouses"

They're made by someone else and rebranded. Next!

"As for software, you are correct, people dont "need" MS products, after all there is about 20 open source equivelent versions of anything MS has producted, but people do "want" to use them."

Nope. People's bosses buy the software for the office because "We've always had Windoze".

"If someone i know has a problem with documents 8 times out of 10 they are using some version of open office."

Funny, I thought you were going to say that they forgot to save in Office 97 compatibility mode and their colleagues couldn't open the file in Office 2003...

"Windows is what every day joe blogs wants to use because it works, no messing about, no trawling forums to get help with installing something, its easy, it may not be perfect but generally for the largest market out there it is what they want."

So, with Windows you DON'T need to reinstall the operating system every three months? It's funny because my experience was exactly the opposite. There WAS a lot of messing about and trawling forums to get help.

"MS are targeting younger generations for a reason, because generally they will replace the current ones."

So MS are adopting the same tactics that drug dealers allegedly were in the early 90s. "Target them young". Doesn't surprise me.