Microsoft are sh!te. I hate the company with a vengeance. I've seen so many excellent solutiosn lose palce to a cobbled-togetrher solution from MS
BUT their financial clout means nobody can stand up to them.
UNIX in it's SUN, HP and IBM flavours were each great operating systems with advanced features nobody has in ANY of the alternatives even still !!
Linux allowed developers to leech those ideas out into smaller/simpler version for the FSF crowd ( SCO threatened LINUX users with over 250 patent violations, but it's gone quiet - probably coz IBM and HP are seriously investing in LINUX )
But they lack some of the richness and expansion. But it'll come and if RedHat, SuSE, MandrakeSoft, et al coudl stop pissing in each others solution space it coudl win out. BUT there are stil enough variations to make it hard to deply multi-version LINUX
IBM have just announed a £50M investment to move their application space to LINUX and to 'harden' their LINUX solutions. Sadly if they make the mistake they did with AIX then it's doomed

You can grab the Beta on the XP Spyware/Firewall at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en ( I dont think it checks for MSDN membership - but it might ) BUT it's beta so it is liekly a NIGHTMARE to remove ( MS do uninstalls last ) so caveat-emptor !!!