Dave Child over at ILoveJackDaniels has a post entitled
Happy 30th Birthday Microsoft.

My sentiments exactly. Were it not for Windows 3.11 and trumpet winsock, I never would’ve gotten online. After the bluescreens of death from windows 95, and Wierd Al Yankovik’s “Boot Me Up” paradoy song, I started realizing MS had it’s drawbacks.

Pretty much since my career start in 1994 I’ve been an open source fan, it allowed me to buy hosting for $30/month for 2 megs with shell access using Linux+Apache.

Microsoft is a necessary force. It drives innovation. It’s just most of the innovating is not being done by them :)