Who in his or her right mind believes the customer is always right? Not I. I've seen too many customers who hadn't a clue about what they wanted, or worse, who deliberately fibbed when the nice survey taker with the clipboard asked them what they'd like: "Mrs. Ferguson, would you like your next car better if it had a heated cup holder?"

The Mrs. (and Mr.) Fergusons of our great land always want a better cup holder, gearshift, trunk, rearview mirror, hood ornament--whatever it might be. We didn't get to be a consumer society by not consuming everything we could lay our hands on, and in ever bigger, ever better shapes and sizes.

-- Robert A. Lutz, Guts

And that, my friends, is why you can't get anything done with your computers anymore because they're virus breeding grounds. Microsoft or Adobe come along and ask if you'd like some useless feature, like being able to script inside Outlook or Acrobat, and of course the clueless embeciles say, sure! I might need that feature someday! More likely, that feature will be used against you someday. But we just don't know how to say no. We gotta have the newest, the slickest, the most feature-filled. Never mind we never touch 90% of the feature bloat, and we complain that it's too complicated, and the only people who ever use most of the capabilities on the machines on our desks are the virus writers.

BeOS sure has a lot of appeal to me right now--a no-frills OS that's just an OS, nothing more, nothing less, with simple apps that just get the job done. And all at blazing speed. So the company's about to go under. BFD. I stuck with my Amiga through Commodore's troubles, and even for a couple of years after the company evaporated. If the machine works, I don't really care who else is running the same stuff I'm running. What about support? It's not like Microsoft fixes its bugs either, so if I'm gonna run an OS that isn't going to be fixed, it might as well be one that started off good in the first place.