BWA-hahahahahaha! I had been contemptuously dismissive of Apple's "Switch" campaign, mostly because of the universally dweebish character of the "professional" users they trot out as spokesvermin (as opposed to Tony Hawk and Kelly Slater, who have day-jobs not involving computer crap). It must have been effective, however, because Microsoft came up with their own "Switch" campaign showing how "easy" (read: painful) it is to switch to Winders from a Macintosh. The problem? The whole thing was a lie.

Way back when MS was in court trying to claim, with straight faces, that they weren't monopolists but were philanthropists of the first order, they claimed that the people were on their side. To demonstrate, they pointed to a "grass roots" effort to petition the court to stop picking on Microsoft. Unfortunately for MS, the artificial nature of the campaign was winkled out in an amazingly short time, and the online world crafted a new name for that kind of underhandesness: "astroturf". (Get it? Artificial grass? Hee hee!)

Right on schedule, MS demonstrates that they continue to think their job is to LIE TO THEIR F*CKING CUSTOMERS!!!! Is there anybody who still believes that Microsoft is out to do anything, and I mean anything whatsoever, besides increase their market share and/or earnings? Other corporations have to limit their predations upon their customer base because the customers could go somewhere else. If IBM lies to you about WebSphere, BEA will cheerfully sell you a Weblogic license. If Oracle lies to you about their security-hardened database, well then IBM will sell you a DB2 license. Microsoft doesn't seem to have that limit; if Microsoft lies to you about a security vulnerability (cross-site scripting, VBA, HTML mail in Outlook, etc etc ad nauseam), then you can, um, piss up a rope.

I can only hope that a security breach so extreme happens somewhere that insurance firms will either raise the premiums for, or stop insuring entirely, companies which use Microsoft products as their infrastructure. I don't see any other path down which the U.S. would cease their reliance on Microsoft products, damn it all.