most hated software
A question on LinkedIn asks about "software that is so unstable, so ugly, or so frustrating that you just hate to use it". Almost every single response points to Microsoft products.
- Jane Prusakova's blog
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Small wonder. That company
Small wonder. That company has so much bad karma that I think they deserve a lot of the scorn heaped on them. I'm often accused of bias on this (and I am), but I'm far from the only one. Most of the products they have that people use and like are either things they bought or things they copied. Even when MS buys up something that doesn't suck they tend to ruin it and their corporate culture doesn't seem to lend itself to building things that are truly great.
Someday I hope to tell you a
Someday I hope to tell you a story.
Visio used to be great, til
Visio used to be great, til msft bought it.
I used it from v3 (maybe v2) til now.
msft introduced bugs in it that still aren't fixed to this date. Changed things around with zero/zippo value-added.
In addition to karma, MS has
In addition to karma, MS has arguably the most software out on the market - and the most successful branding, so that people actually know that they are running Microsoft products.
Then again, monopoly power allows to produce crappy product, and have customers buy it regardless.
Jane Prusakova
Software Architect & Developer
My blog
Agree: This is the dilemma
Agree: This is the dilemma both for consumers and competitors.
The "monopoly" power gained by MS in the marketplace came about due to a vision that consumers and businesses both bought in to in great numbers. The original MS vision was backed up by very smart marketing, distribution, and vendor management -- not without hitches but certainly with huge success. However, vision was the key.
Those who were adults and using technology at the time, think back to what the competition was when Windows and MS Office first appeared. MS truely did something unique and revolutionary... especially for non-technical users.
Microsoft is truely responsible for putting the desktop on the desks of ordinary people everywhere. There would be no "high-tech" without MS -- or someone else -- making this vision real.
There is no doubt that MS marketing, distribution, and vendor strategy, over time, became (shall we say) a bit overly aggressive... focused more on market share and domination of competitors than on quality products. Their vision became compromised but their success continued.
Even to this day, MS faces little high-level competition in the OS arena. Neither the Mac OS, Sun, or Linux flavors have significantly eroded their market base in non-tech users or business users.
If this company (Microsoft) produced ice cream, peanut butter, or hamburgers, we would be praising their marketing / distribution / vendor strategy as an awesome paradigm shift with great accolades. Yes, there's plenty of room for a good joke in that sentence but not for now ;~)
It is not unusual in terms of mass consumption marketing -- and MS is nothing if not purveyor to the masses -- to find the market leader does not produce the highest quality product or service. Popularity is not indicative of high quality, only of popularity.
Huge sales volumes coupled with ample profit margins and popularity among the vast majority of buyers does not drive an organization to change. The drive is to do more of the same. The drive is to introduce new features or improvements only to the level that will maintain popularity. There is no incentive to market to a smaller sub-set of high-tech users demanding better performance or greater stability. It is only if and when ordinary users complain and viable options exist that the organization is pushed toward improvement.
This then is the dilemma for competitors as well. The MS vision is there; it remains hugely popular. For the most part, the OS and the applications are function rich, perform adequately, and incrementally improve. The MS user base is huge.
You might call that a monopoly but it is no different than Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Blue Bell, or Skippy in many ways. This monopoly is still driven by people lining up at the sales counter, so to speak, and purchasing MS products despite the fact that other options exist. Those options have not become main stream enough to attract the non-tech users who simply want to email, take pictures, surf the web, and say hello to their friends on Facebook.
So, where is the next mainstream consumer OS or application suite? Who steps up with the vision, marketing strategy and product line to make it happen?
Anyone want to bootstrap a start-up?
;~)
William W. (Woody) Williams
Project Management Consultant
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w3src Consulting
Very well put. We can dis MS
Very well put.
We can dis MS all we want, but until someone steps up with a campaign to reach "the masses" with superior products it won't mean much.
I have an old 486 running BSD UNIX that will run literally for a year or more at a time without a reboot. I have a fairly new Athlon machine running Windows that reboots itself approximately once a day.
It's easy for me to write that BSD UNIX is much more stable, but how does that help Aunt Matilda, who just wants to get e-mail with pictures of her grandchildren? She can't spell "UNIX", wouldn't have a clue where to get it, and wouldn't know what to do with it if she did. She bought her computer at Wal-Mart or Best Buy, and bought it because it looked nice and was showing pretty pictures on the screen, proof that it could show her pictures of her granddaughter. It said "Windows" on the box, and that was a name that was familiar to her because she's heard it so many places, including from younger family members.
The only computer software company that even registers to Aunt Matilda besides Windows is Apple, but when she goes to the stores there are very few Apples and they all look expensive.
Yes, Aunt Matilda is an extreme case, but a lot of corporate purchasers aren't a lot more sophisticated than Aunt Matilda. Their real focus is on getting boxes on desktops within the allowed budget, and getting least pushback. We used to say, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." That's been replaced by, "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft."
None of this says that MS products are the best, thought it probably says that they're at least not likely the worst. The real point is, as you write, that MS had a vision and pursued it very successfully. For us techies that might not seem so admirable without superior products, but in the business world it certainly is.
--
Jerry Dunham
Agreeing
If Microsoft had built their
If Microsoft had built their monopoly only the way you say, I wouldn't have much of a problem with them. The problem is that their monopoly status came about as more due to cutthroat unethical and/or outright illegal practices and to being at the right place at the right time. What I disagree with you is that MS's bad practices became so over time. No, they pretty much were that way from the beginning, they just had a lot of weight to throw around once they had achieved de-facto monopoly power in markets that they could leverage to others. I'm not saying that Microsoft didn't have a vision -- I'm just saying that it certainly wasn't a benevolent one. The computing world could have been a much better place had a more ethical company (or companies) been the driver(s) over the past 30 years.
I'm not willing to give Microsoft a lot of credit for bringing desktop computing to the masses because it was going to happen whether they came along or not or whether they became a dominant player or not. In fact, I think that the fact that one company was so successful at systematically killing off competitors everywhere it went has actually held back the advancement of PC technology by years. A playing ground where no one company controls a majority market share will foster much more innovation than one where one company can largely dictate the pace of change. Like you said, once a product has a dominant market share usually all that the vendor will do is change it just enough to keep the upgrade gravy train going.
Who would like a PC market where the only x86 vendor was IBM? Where their only competition was Apple? Do you think we'd see computers affordable by the masses? How about if Toyota had 90+% of the auto market? You think Honda or Ford owners would like things much if almost nobody made replacement parts, accessories, etc., tailored to them because they only had a small market share?
The world has unfortunately traded away the power of diversity in favor of hegemony just to take the easy way out of having to make decisions. It was easy when "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"... its always easy to do whatever everyone else is doing... But there are consequences in the long run if not the short.
And its not just that people make bad or short sighted decisions... when you have an aggressively monopolistic player in a market they can (and Microsoft has been proven to do so in court) use a number of tactics both legal and illegal to effectively exclude other competitors from the market even when options exist. For example Microsoft has used practices such as product dumping (selling below cost to drive competitors from a market), exclusionary contracts (telling vendors they can't sell competitors products) and other strong-arm tactics to make sure that consumers don't have access to competing products.
Here's the difference between Wal-Mart, McDonald's and other companies that are considered the 800lb Gorilla in their industries... NONE of them have or have ever been anywhere near 90% market share at anything. There have always been the Targets, K-Marts, Burger Kings and Wendy's out there to keep them in check. Microsoft needs a competitor or competitors with much more than Apple or Linux's market share in order to keep them honest. Right now they clearly are not -- and I'm not the only one who thinks that, the courts in Europe and the US have said many of the same things.
OK... Microsoft was founded
OK...
Microsoft was founded to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. From 1975 to about mid-1981, the company had no large scale successes and was certainly not in the business of dominating anyone or doing illegal deals.
In mid-81, MS signed the deal with IBM to provide what became MS-DOS as an operating system for the IBM PC. They had previously stuck their foot in the OS water with Xenix, a Unix version. MS-DOS didn't make them an overnight gorilla either.
It wasn't until Columbia Data Products successfully cloned the IBM BIOS and opened the flood gates to multitudes of IBM clone machines flooding the market and lowering prices that Microsoft started on the road to success. Their aggressive marketing to clone makers is the beginning of the period where their market share and marketing high jinks began to raise eye brows and blood pressure.
In a way, this "problems" can be laid at the foot of CDP and the clone makers who wanted to go to market with the same OS as the IBM system. There is plenty of greed to go around in this story and not all of it belongs on the walls of the house that Gates built.
In late 1985, the first retail version of Windows released and shortly after (March 1986) their IPO brought the company public. This all largely based on their success in the IBM clone OS market and hopes in the retail market.
Anyone taking a look around the OS market for choices in the early and mid-80's is not going to find much in the way of competition. Personal computers largely came of age with the IBM-PC and in so doing cemented the name of Microsoft in the buying public's mind. The subsequent rash of clone PCs simply added to that. Suddenly, Microsoft was everywhere and everyone was talking about it.
Microsoft had done nothing illegal or anti-competitive at this point to become so. MS was either "lucky" or very smart to ink the deal with IBM when they did. Perhaps there was some luck at work when CDP cracked the IBM BIOS as well but it was "smart" that allowed a deluge of IBM clones that all wanted the same OS to go to market with it. Kudos to Microsoft.
Major issues that led to subsequent legal tangles have their roots in Microsoft Office (1989 release), Internet Explorer (1995 - Windows 95 in the "Plus! Pak), and their callous use of "standards."
In the first case (Office and IE) they have been accused of using exclusive knowledge of the OS to build software that runs better on Windows than competitors -- even those with development licenses -- can. This is true and several court cases have been decided against MS this regard.
In the second case (standards), the terrain is less clearly defined but perhaps more intensely disliked in the tech community than any other MS action. This MS strategy has been described as "embrace, extend and extinguish." It is a particularly destructive approach to the market place and has been perniciously used by Microsoft especially in the area of Internet standards.
MS tactics have been to initially embrace a competing standard or product, then "extend" that standard or incorporate the product to produce their own version. That version built on the new MS "extensions" is now incompatible with the original standard. Because of their market position, this -- over time -- destroys competition because competitors do not or cannot use Microsoft's new version.
These "extensions" are, for the most part, neither innovation nor improvement although that point is arguable in some cases, overall the use of extensions is more a strategy to destroy competition. This is also true; ditto the court cases.
Don't misunderstand the previous posting or think that ignorance played any role in it. It did not.
No matter what Microsoft is today or was in the '90's, they did not start that way. They had the extreme good fortune to be in the right place at the right time with the IBM deal in 1981. People and businesses embraced their product, used it, loved it. It became the most popular thing on the block because it was good enough and because IBM (and subsequent clones) put in on desktops everywhere. The initial phenomenal success of Microsoft was based on filling a huge need in a huge new market, not on illegal or Draconian trade practices.
Getting back to Basic,
William W. (Woody) Williams
Project Management Consultant
| Blog | Twitter |
w3src Consulting
W3 wrote: "In mid-81, MS
W3 wrote:
"In mid-81, MS signed the deal with IBM to provide what became MS-DOS as an operating system for the IBM PC. They had previously stuck their foot in the OS water with Xenix, a Unix version. MS-DOS didn't make them an overnight gorilla either."
My first home PC, after several non-PC home computers, ran Xenix, not MS-DOS. For the time, it was actually great stuff. I ran that thing (a 286, IIRC) until the wheels fell off and I graduated to a home-built 486 running FreeBSD. Back in those days I was quite an MS fan, but it was all about Xenix, not MS-DOG or Windoze. I know there were valid business reasons for abandoning Xenix to the idiots running SCO, but it sure lost them this here customer for a long time. I still can't think of any MS OS that I've used since that was as reliable as Xenix.
--
Jerry Dunham
Reminiscing
God yes! I have had MS
God yes! I have had MS products crash so many times on my PCs that I finally had my sons put in Linux and started using Google apps. Good bye forever Bill Gates!
Why whenever I use Google do
Why whenever I use Google do I get an error message that Adobe a problem?
Google isn't dependent on
Google isn't dependent on anything from Adobe. I have used Google on machines with no Adobe software installed at all. I've never seen an error message from Google like you are talking about.
Must be my MS OS doing it.
Must be my MS OS doing it.
Or maybe IE. Have you tried
Or maybe IE. Have you tried it under Firefox or Opera?
I don't know. But as you do
I don't know. But as you do know, I use what comes in the package. I've never tried or used Firefox or Opera. I used to use Netscape as my browser but was mercilously ridiculed by some of my San Antonio IT friends who shamed me into using IE.
With friends like that, you
With friends like that, you don't need any enemies... It isn't very difficult to try Firefox, and if you don't like it, you haven't lost anything.
No comment except that they
No comment except that they are my very good friends.
Good friends or not, most
Good friends or not, most people, even those who aren't generally biased against Microsoft would tend to agree that recommending using IE as a browser is bad advice.
You don't know when to stop,
You don't know when to stop, now do you?
I suppose not... but you
I suppose not... but you sure are stubborn about sticking to IE for no apparent reason... Its like living with a headache rather than trying an aspirin to see if it might help...
Me? Stubborn? Its a matter
Me? Stubborn? Its a matter of my choice. Besides I don't have that many issues with MS OS or any of the applications, and I certainly don't have the openly public axe to grind against MS. So its my decision. Besides, you already said that you don't have the time to help me migrate.
Aside from that? You took not one, but two slaps at very close personal friends of mine. They happen to be a Microsoft Certified Partner and a Small Business Specialist. They are business owners and entrepeneurs. They provide a range of IT services to small businesses. They take risk every day in their own business. They work hard. I take their advice. They have the time (actually, they make the time) to help me if and when I have a problem. They are community minded. They are my friends.
Please don't take it any further.
I did offer to refer you to
I did offer to refer you to people who would be able to help you if you were seriously interested in migrating, but I never really got the impression you were sincere about that, so I didn't go any further than that.
There is no "migration" involved in trying another browser on the same OS, you click on download, install, clicky clicky, nothing to it. Same as installing any other piece of software. O.K., maybe if you want to bring over your "favorites" to Firefox bookmarks that's almost like a migration, but I think it will ask you for that and take care of it for you. The whole process really isn't really any more difficult than trying on a new pair of shoes.
I don't understand how a minor flippant remark is a "slap". It wasn't ever intended to be any sort of personal insult anyway, and I think you are making a big deal about nothing that was ever intended to be serious. Anyway, I assume that they are big boys, and I think they can handle it. I can't imagine anyone being in business for very long not having to deal with far worse than someone insulting a product they sell.
I'm not in the sort of business they are, nor am I particularly interested in getting into it. And if you choose to discount me because I am not an entrepreneur then that is fine too.
If they are really offended, then I offer my apologies for that, like I said, I didn't intend any personal insult.
I took offense at it, not
I took offense at it, not them. They don't read here. But, I don't think that you are in a position to judge.
Me, insincere? "Shirley you jest!"
I use the software I use because it is easy for me. I don't have that many problems that it is an issue for me. I certainly don't share your angst against Microsoft. Of course, given your anti-MS outburst against Bing that brought out the project leader, maybe they're watching you more closely...LOL
Feh. It isn't the first
Feh. It isn't the first time they've been "watching me". In this case I suspect that the project leader was just doing some vanity "googling" of himself and/or his project. A lot of people do that. I wouldn't even go so far as to say what I posted was particularly an "outburst"... it was just general grousing. I can't re-post my comments about Bing from another here for fear of going past the edge of forum decorum on door64. Even that was more just a play on replacing the vowel in Bing with some others in a slightly off-color way that was intended to be humorous.
Oh... and I do jest, but please don't call me Shirley.
Anyway, if you think I'm hostile towards MS, then you should meet some of the other people I know. I'm just snarky, some people I know are just downright bitter. I think that is because I've been at least somewhat successful at being able to avoid having to use MS's stuff any more than I've had to and some of them haven't been so fortunate. As someone, threew I think, said "familiarity breeds contempt".
Anyway, my reasons for using the software I do are the same as yours actually... Linux and the other stuff like Firefox I use is just easier for me.
FWIW, I used to view IBM about the same way as I currently do MS (where do you think MS learned most of their tricks?), however after they rebuilt themselves in the 1990s they are a changed company and corrected at least most of the bad things they used to do. So in regards to keeping an open mind if/when MS is willing or (like IBM) forced to re-make themselves I may change my mind about them. But I won't be holding my breath waiting.
Should have written Google
Should have written Google docs
OK: So I took a look at the
OK: So I took a look at the comments and apps listed in the LinkedIn discussion. Went through all 60-odd, page by page (3) and counted complaints by:
MS/OS |MS Product {On MS OS}{On Other OS} | Other OS | Other Product
Made tick mark for every mention. One tick for every mention so results include duplicates. May have missed something; wasn't overly analytical ;~) but these results are probably very close.
Microsoft OS complaints: 15
Other OS complaints: 2 (Both Linux)
MS Product complaints: 19 (2 noted on Mac OS)
Other (non-MS) product complaints: 33
There are more complaints than comments because some commenters mentioned multiple items.
This is obviously unscientific but considering MS is the most widely used OS and MS (especially Office) software applications are just about obsequious on desktops and laptops everywhere, the results look pretty even.
Lotus Notes was probably the most mentioned non-MS product. Internet Explorer was only mentioned once.
It should come as no surprise to anyone, given the wide range of technical skills in users across the board, that the most widely used products would receive the most criticism. As the old adage goes, familiarity breeds contempt.
Ticking off as I go,
William W. (Woody) Williams
Project Management Consultant
| Blog | Twitter |
w3src Consulting
Dontcha just hate getting
Dontcha just hate getting "ticked off?"
I wish more of the
I wish more of the commenters on LinkedIn would have said why they didn't like certain software. It's much more informative and interesting when people explain than reading a laundry list of "Vista... Lotus Notes... MS Office".
I am currently cursing the ezLabor online payroll system. As far as I can tell, there's no way for a user to set up a "default" workday. So if your work hours are pretty regular, you have to enter the same thing 5 times. It also has no intelligence at all in its own defaults. For instance, if your first work stint for the day was 8 am to 1 pm, guess what? The lunch and afternoon work are also going to be pm. It's way too easy to accidentally log 19-hour or -5 hour workdays.
I guess I'm probably a
I guess I'm probably a strange one, but I use:
Computer: Apple iMac (recent Intel)
Primary OS: Windows Vista SP2
Primary Browser: Firefox 3
Primary Office Suite: Google Docs
Top 3 recently used programs: Notepad, Explorer, Steam
How about others that have commented here? Care to profile? :p
~M
Its not much of a secret
Its not much of a secret what I use...
Computer: Various x86 boxes, mostly AMD processors
Primary OS: Linux, mostly Ubuntu for "desktops" lately.
Primary Browser: Firefox 3
Primary Office Suite: OpenOffice
Top 3 recently used programs: vi, dolphin, xv
The recent application mix is a bit atypical for me. I had to move a lot of images from SD media, resize them and then create html for it...
I have a variety of
I have a variety of different boxes on various platforms. However, I spend almost all my working time on an elderly laptop that is looking for replacement soon.
Laptop: Dell Inspiron 600m, Intel Pentium(R) M 1700 MHz, 1.70 GHz, 1.00 GB Ram
Laptop OS: MS Windows XP, Home Edition, SP3
Laptop Browser: Firefox 3.0.11
Primary Office Suite: OpenOffice
Top 3 recently used apps: TweetDeck, Notepad, OpenOffice
I think my least favorite application of all time was MS FrontPage. Forced to use it at one gig and it was a nightmare until I finally got them migrated (over a year later) to DreamWeaver.
William W. (Woody) Williams
Project Management Consultant
| Blog | Twitter |
w3src Consulting
That laptop is waaay newer
That laptop is waaay newer than one I use on a daily basis at work. It is an IBM Thinkpad 600. 300MHz Pentium II, 288MB RAM (maxed out). I think they quit making this model around 1999. I bought it used in 2001, replaced the original battery, maxed the memory out and swapped out the original 6GB HD for a 40G one and its been running pretty much every since... Heck the battery I put in even still holds a charge for a while.
Admittedly I don't ask it to do much heavy lifting (mainly use it to log into servers), but it keeps plugging along. I wish newer hardware was 1/2 as sturdy as those things were...
That's actually quite a nice
That's actually quite a nice notebook for its time. When it came out I took one apart and was very impressed with its construction and technology.
--
Jerry Dunham
Admiring
Have a Sony Vaio from around
Have a Sony Vaio from around that same time; using the hard drive for something else right now but that is a nice machine and plan to Linux it as soon as I'm done with hard drive.
That Thinkpad is a solid, hard working piece of art.
William W. (Woody) Williams
Project Management Consultant
| Blog | Twitter |
w3src Consulting
I bought the one I have used
I bought the one I have used from eBay w/o OS, so it got loaded with Linux as soon as I put the 40G hard drive in it. The 6G drive it came with is probably at the bottom of one of the junk boxes out in my shed somewhere. There are some tiny distros that will work on that small a drive, but when I bought that machine I actually used it for some fairly serious work.
I have to agree on the quality, IBM really did things right with that series Thinkpad. The only things I've had to replace on it have been batteries, both the CMOS battery and the main one. But that is once each on a machine that is now somewhere between 10-12 years and that's not bad at all. Unfortunately I'm not sure the current Lenovo built models are as good as the old ones were. I don't have any personal experience to back that up though, I'm just going based on what I've heard.
Well, this thread certainly
Well, this thread certainly got out of hand. I'll just had my favorite application to hate: Lotus cc:Mail. That was the standard e-mail system at Dell when I got there (later changed to Exchange/Outlook), and it had to be the worst application from a real SW vendor I've had the misfortune to interact with. Did anyone else out there trip over this mess?
--
Jerry Dunham
cc:Failing
To all, my
To all, my apologies.
Creaky-techno-non-geek.
I've had the Lotus Notes /
I've had the Lotus Notes / Mail experience at several gigs. Certainly a different animal with some learning curve to it. Some features I came to appreciate greatly; others not so much.
When it absolutely, positively has to get lost at the speed of light, try email ;~)
William W. (Woody) Williams
Project Management Consultant
| Blog | Twitter |
w3src Consulting
What is it that people hate
What is it that people hate about Lotus Notes? I used to use it at a former job, and I thought it was OK, although I didn't get into the more exotic features much.
In my case, I can't speak
In my case, I can't speak for those that hate it. It's certainly a bit different but I didn't hate it.
I did notice that the support folks had an unusually hard time keeping it running consistently. In both places I worked that used it, there was a lot of down time.
William W. (Woody) Williams
Project Management Consultant
| Blog | Twitter |
w3src Consulting
I can't really say I hate
I can't really say I hate any software I use currently. Firefox bugs me once in a while due to various things, but I don't hate it.
Of course most of the
Of course most of the answers reference MS products. I don't think, however, it is necessarily a result of bad products as much as the fact that just about everyone uses them and everyone is likely to form a beef with whatever software they use.
I think the results of that LI question says more about how prevalent that software is than how good it is.
I've had my share of run-ins with various MS packages (Office 2007 is a disaster), but still view the company favorably overall. However, the worst software that I am forced to use on a semi-regular basis would be either Adobe Acrobat (Pure Evil) or Apple Quicktime. If you count embedded software, Sony takes the grand prize for their horrible MP3 player firmware.
I think that answers really
I think that answers really matter more when a person is familiar with two products which essentially serve the same function. When you can compare the two and say one stinks more than the other it is more useful than just saying that one package stinks. Every package is going to have some problems, and some people are going to hit more of those problems given their usage patterns than others.
It just happens that from my experience using both MS products and competing products that generally I've been less happy with MS. And if your assertion that people form a beef with whatever software they use is correct (and I think there is merit to the argument), then that doesn't go in MS's favor either, because historically I'd say I've spent less than 10% of my time using their stuff, and it has caused me 90+% of my computer grief. To be fair, a lot of that grief was shared by friends/family who begged for help fixing things like virus/spyware infestations or help with disk or registry corruption. On the other hand I get a lot fewer requests like that for help from people who are using Macs or Linux even proportional to the number of people I know who use them and the problems tend to be easier for me to deal with.
I think there are a number
I think there are a number of factors to consider with your scenario:
1) In COMPARATIVE analysis, I'd think people would most favor what they were most familiar with.
2) People who use Linux are far more likely to have advanced knowledge of computing that people who pick the "default" options like Windows. This is less of a factor with Macs, but I think that the average Mac user is also a little more technie than the average Windows user too.
3) I think there is some selection bias in your analysis. That is, it is easy to over-emphasize the importance and frequency of problems you have encountered on the Windows platform when you have a personal preference for a different OS.
There is probably some
There is probably some validity to factors 1 and 3... But I don't think they overwhelm the fact that Windows really does seem to be a lot more fragile and under attack than *nix or Macs.
Actually I am not completely sure if I agree with all of premise 2. Many of the Mac users that I know have less technical knowledge than even the average Windows user. In fact, I've specifically recommended Macs to (in particular family members) neophytes because I honestly believe they are more difficult to mess up and easier to fix when they do. Not to say that they can't be messed up or even messed up bad, just that it is harder and happens less frequently, especially if the user isn't the type that is a tinkerer who goes digging around. Windows is very dangerous for that type.
The other part I disagree with on #2 is that a lot of the people who use Linux or advanced users who pick Macs have done so because they have extensive Windows experience and are just plain fed up. So its not that they picked Linux or Mac first because they were more knowledgeable to begin with, but because of experience. This also partly negates #1, because as others have said, sometimes "familiarity breeds contempt". The fact that so many experienced users who could use anything they want pick a non-Windows OS says something all by itself.
And a lot of people who use Windows do so not because they choose it, but because their employer chooses it, or their computer came with it, or some piece of software they need (or more likely a game) requires it.