define "trust" ?
"Trust and Microsoft are not two words that we often see in the same sentence..."
Well that depends.
Trevor gets remarkably close to what lots of people should define it as: "end user control over their own devices, applications and operating systems " (assuming data is implicitly in there somewhere).
But MS main customers aren't end users. The main customers are not even the shrinking army of certified Microsoft Dependent business partners.
In terms of trust, MS customers are largely two groups of people: the IT departments, and the "content rights owners". And to a lesser extent the PC builders (Dell HP etc), but their reasons for staying onboard are commercial and largely unrelated to "trust".
You've seen the IT departments and/or their representatives in this thread already: "For an end-to end solution, MS is the most viable option." where "viable" = "trustworthy" in terms of making it nearly work, or at least appear to work, some of the time. But in terms of data privacy, or data integrity/robustness?
The major content rights owners were another group who MS managed to convince of their trustworthiness (see e.g. MS Mediaroom (?)). MS were allegedly trustworthy in terms of protecting high value content all the way from the content owners to the content consumption device. Vista was the first big attempt at that, as was BT Vision's MS-based set top box. Where are Vista and the MS-based set top box now? Irrelevant.
End users are also largely irrelevant in the MS world.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
