Oxymoron: Microsoft Works

Is anyone else irritated by Microsoft's unbridled arrogance? After the latest "in-between" operating system upgrade on Tuesday, 22 June 2010, Microsoft had the unmitigated gall to change my default home page in Internet Explorer from Google search to Microsoft's own Bing search engine. They have no business changing user preferences!

This is not the only instance of Microsoft's audacity:

• After almost every second-Tuesday-of-the-month operating system upgrade that includes an update to Outlook, the process changes my default email from Mozilla's Thunderbird to Microsoft's Outlook.
  
• Long ago and far away, I once made the mistake of setting my default bitmap file association to one of Microsoft's image software packages. I don't remember if it was Paint or the old Photo Editor, but whatever it was, it automatically established itself as the default file association not just for bitmap files but for all other image types as well: .gif, .jpg, .png, and others. I guess Microsoft thinks that if you want their product for one item, you will certainly want it for everything else as well.
  

Such deplorable conduct would not be justified even if Microsoft's products were superior to the alternatives—but they are not! Google is still superior to Bing; Thunderbird's email package with its multitude of useful add-ons runs rings around Outlook; free image software like IrfanView and FastStone Image Viewer are far superior to any image viewers Microsoft has ever produced; free archive packages like 7-Zip, IZArc, and PeaZip have many more features than Microsoft's lame zipfldr.dll file; and on and on...

Unfortunately, Apple and Steve Jobs are just as prententious as Microsoft in their own distinctly offensive way. A pox on both their houses.

Long live Linux/Ubuntu!