> The point about switching to an alternative isn't an engineering reaction, it's a political suggestion that is based on sending the right message. When MS does something you find objectionable, the way to signal that you strongly disagree in a capitalist system is to vote with your wallet. Continuing to use Window only sends the message that the recent changes are acceptable.

No. What I meant to say is that only engineers or technical folks without business experience say these kinds of things.

My mission as a businessman is to get shit done. It also happens to be my mission as an engineer. I could not be bothered to worry about these OS issues. Windows allows me to buy 50 workstations, load them up with a pile of engineering software and get shit done. From a business perspective that is the right decision and the right solution. Quirks don't matter.

Switching OS isn't a consideration or an option because it is irrelevant. The goal is to spend 10 to 12 hours a day working with specific applications to get specific work done, not to spend 10 or 12 hours a day playing with the OS. That's a huge difference in mindset and focus.

> I'm sure it isn't, but that was one of the risks in building a business that depends critically on a product you have zero control over. MS has a very long history of doing things their own way, and usually in their own interest.

You are absolutely wrong on this one. MS has ALWAYS protected their users. The stability afforded to business users across decades is probably without match. In sharp contrast to this Apple has gone through a number of episodes where they pretty much said "screw all of you, all your software is now dead", most notably with the transition in and out of the PowerPC platforms. MS has never done that.

No, MS has always been the soundest investment. Not even Linux can match the stability of the platform. Over the years there have been driver issues as well as UI confusion. In many ways Ubuntu is the greatest thing to ever happen to Linux and it still has faults and is a challenge to use outside of technical environments.

> Accept that you may have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad investments? You invested in tools that depends fundamentally on a risky platform.

The truth is exactly opposite your statement. The platform has never been risky because MS understands business and the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested are perfectly safe. We still have some very expensive software from a couple of decades ago that runs very well under Windows Vista, 7 and 10.

Also, I don't think you understand that these tools are simply not available on any other platform. There's a reason for which all the major MCAD companies have product that runs on Windows. It's because their multi-million dollar investment across decades is safe there and goes nowhere on other platforms.

Look, I wish Windows had a Linux foundation and a bunch of other things under the hood. That's me, the geek, speaking. Me the businessman fires-up a VM with Ubuntu and, as they say, is happy as pigs in shit. My job isn't to play with the OS, it's to get useful work done with the tools we need to use to get product out the door.