Charlie brought up a good point last week when he talked about the difference between being a writer and being a critic.

Sometime last week, I started getting hits from WatchingMicrosoftLikeAHawk.com. They had linked my "Why I Dislike Microsoft" piece. All told, just under 100 people followed that link here. A couple of people e-mailed me asking for permission to link. I thanked them for the link, which brings up a point. Some sites prohibit deep-linking, or try to. So let it be known now: Link to anything on this site that you want. Sure, I want people to read my new stuff and not just my old stuff, but getting them to read my new stuff is my responsibility, not yours. If you deep link, and my writing in that piece plus 30 headlines over on the right-hand side doesn't get someone to stay, shame on me. Prohibition of deep-linking is a sign of bad site layout.

I also got some critics. Some of them seem to believe that corporations can do no wrong. Others disregard antitrust law, which states that the owner of a monopoly has to play by different rules than companies that don't have a monopoly, and that the owner of a monopoly cannot use one monopoly to get another.

One anonymous poster told me to name sources and insinuated that I couldn't. Now, had I written for a different audience, I would have used more sources in the first place. A peek at my logs over the past few months indicates the majority of my users are probably very familiar with Microsoft's wrongs. I know a good number of them probably thought of the phrase, "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" when they read the title. To some of them, that piece didn't say anything new at all. It was just the first time they'd seen it all in one place.

But sometimes pieces get read by people outside of the original audience, and that's what happened here. I figured the piece would be read by about 300 people and promptly forgotten. I was wrong.

So I went looking for sources. And I told my nameless critic I'd name sources once he had the guts to post his real name, like I had. Then I came back with a source. A while later he came back with a name.

Before he came back with a name, I had some sources. What I found wasn't pretty. Turns out that if anything, I'd underestimated Microsoft's shenanigans.

My friend Jeanne asked me this week if sometimes having a Web site is more trouble than it's worth. I said yes.

But I'll be back tomorrow.