I hate Microsoft, you should too!

This is not an unreasoned or unfounded hate. I can name a few thousand good reasons why you too should hate the company and their products. There is no arguing that as a business entity, they’re simply doing what they should do to remain the best. However, their products have a greater negative impact on quality of life than you would like to think.

Today’s little point to ponder is this: if Microsoft really gave a shit about its users, why does no Windows install come with PDF or Postscript support by default? Well, if they did this, more users would distribute documents in PDF format. PDF, or Portable Document Format, was designed as a platform-independent way to distribute typeset documents and this it does incredibly well. If more users distributed PDF documents and other users could read these documents with the free Acrobat Reader, these users would NOT be starting up MS Office to read these documents. In addition, the documents could be sent to people NOT using Windows, HEAVEN FORBID! So, from a commercial perspective this was a good decision to ignore PDF. Unfortunately, the user gets screwed.