An interesting thread for my first post.
I'm a long time Microsoft user:
- ms-dos
- windows (98, 2000, xp, Vista, 7)
and a long time Microsoft app user: Money 95, Money 98, Money 2000, ...., Office 95, 98, 2000, ....
and I'm a fairly "sophisticated" user (PhD in Computer Science, designed and developed computer hardware, software, etc., through my whole career. Unix, VM/CMS, MVS, you name it.
So why am I here?
As mentioned above, I was a long time Microsoft Money user. I dutifully bought each version and upgrade. When Microsoft started charging for internet access within Money I grumbled but ponied up. When I had to renew that every year or so, I grumbled but paid.
Then, Microsoft decided to EOL Money. As part of this
support for internet access within Money would
stop working! That's right, a feature that I'd paid for would cease to function.
Microsoft could easily have said "we're not supporting it anymore, use at your own risk" and it wouldn't have cost them a dime. But no, they didn't do that.
I had
years of financial data on Money (cost basis information on stock and mutual fund purchases, credit card purchase history, etc.,) that was essentially useless. Sure, I could manually update everything but why should I? I paid Microsoft time and again for the ability to automatically download account information.
I
swore that I would
never buy another product from Microsoft.
My computer, running Windows 7, died recently (bad motherboard).
I'm typing this on an old XP machine I got out of the closet while I'm waiting for my Mac to be delivered. It may turn out that Apple is even more draconian than Microsoft but that (as far as I'm concerned) remains to be seen.
So I guess I'm a "hater".