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They don't limit choice. You can buy Apple, Linux, Palm, whatever. Crikey, you can get a Linux desktop with Star Office FOR FREE these days, and if that isn't competition I don't know what is.

Microsoft will always have competitors. It is funny how their competitive efforts get described as "anti competitive". Sun, Oracle, and the rest of them are still in business. IBM is still a massive competitor to MS in the several arenas.

It's like criticising Wal-Mart for shutting down mom-and-pop shops. Wal-Mart does a better job because of their scale.

There ARE companies that successfully compete with MS. They are Adobe, Intuit, Macromedia, the list goes on and on. Significantly, they don't spend nearly as much money as Sun and Oracle on litigation, instead they focus on making great products.

There are plenty of areas to compete with MS. The fight for mobile device software is still wide open. It is up to other companies to successfully compete in this arena.

They don't limit choice.

MicroSoft continuously takes business standards and changes them. MicroSoft works AGAINST interoperability.
Look at what they did to Kodak. The took an existing Kodak standard for digital imaging and changed it and included it in Windows XP. What's Kodak's recourse? They developed the software with no help from MS on low-level APIs or System Calls and then MS re-engineers their product and kills their investment. You can call that competitive all you want, but there's no competition.
They're doing it with Adobe, trying to replace the PDF format.
Apple had no choice but to accept Office and IE on their system. Otherwise, they'd be a trivia question.
Sun's beef was MS re-engineered Java into J++ and changed it such that it was a.) not compatible b.) against the license agreement and c.) less secure. Who would want their hard work to be ripped off and changed so that it's reputation was killed?
What if someone was doing this to you in your line of work? What if I was the one laughing at you because I thought MS was 'God's gift to America and you were a liberal loser?'
I have a feeling you're more stockholder than someone who understands technology or economics. MS bottling up your personal information in Passport and keeping it 'secure' (good luck). Or the fact that 'free' doesn't mean anything if it's not interoperable.
The one thing that makes me happy is realizing that MS is painting themselves in a corner. While suckers like you are happy that MS can go through their hard drive and report to Hollywood whatever MP3s you have (I'm sure you've already loaded the service pack that authorizes this), some of us choose otherwise. I like my privacy. I like only ME knowing what's on MY drive (it's all legal, thank you.)
But that's okay, since MS is your god. They can check whatever they want. Keep their tabs on you. Smart. Real smart.