Why I dislike Microsoft

Q: How many Microsoft technicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. They simply redefine darkness as the industry standard.
That sums up perfectly why I don't like Microsoft. They don't adhere to industry standards, and they try to enforce their own on everybody else. Here are some examples:
I worked in the prepress department of a major printing company for five years. We used to shudder when a client brought in a Word or Publisher document for printing, the reason being that Microsoft formats ALL documents (Word, Publisher, Powerpoint, etc) using the default printer driver of the computer on which they are composed. Take the document to another computer, and the composition, pagination, etc, goes to pieces. You have to try and copy drivers from one computer to the other to reconstitute the pagination, and even then it doesn't always work. (And it's impossible if you are moving from PC to Mac.)
If you create a style sheet in Word, the moment you make a slight change to a font (eg, bold, italic) etc, Word automatically creates a new style sheet. By the time you have finished formatting a whole document, you have dozens of totally unnecessary style sheets, which you dare not delete. NO-ONE ELSE's word processing or page layout software does this, for the good reason that it's not necessary and it just makes life difficult.
If you make a PowerPoint presentation containing an audio file, and you time slide transitions to the audio, the timing goes all out if you play the presentation on another computer. I don't understand the full technicalities, but it's something to do with PowerPoint using the computer system's clock speed for timing, and of course, each computer is slightly different.
Internet Explorer does not conform to the World Wide Web consortium's standards for internet browsers. So unless web pages are composed to meet their standards, they do not show properly on screen, which creates problems for designers who have to also meet the requirements of other browsers, such as Firefox and Opera (which, to be fair, are not perfect in implementation either, but are a lot closer to the internationally accepted standards).
Sun Systems came out with a very useful programming language called Java, which helps web pages perform a lot of the amazing feats you take for granted. So Microsoft hijacked the code, implemented their own version, and are now trying to enforce it on the rest of the world and kill off Sun's Java. They probably won't succeed, but it's typical of the way they operate.
So while I am forced to use a lot of Microsoft software, you can see why I find alternatives wherever possible. It's not just bloody-mindedness - it's essential to keeping sanity in my work day.