My Firefox story - all because I went to an MS seminar...

Well, other people here seem to be sharing theirs so here is mine.  
I work in a mixed MS/Novell/Unix environment supporting systems written in MS languages, running on MS operating systems and using MS database engines for data management.  They were - and still are - just a tool to do a job as far as I am concerned; if they were run on Unix systems written in Java with a MySQL back end it would require a different skillset, but you get the idea. They are just a means to an end for me.
Personally I've spent money on Microsoft software, books, certification training and exams.

At that stage my opinion of MS was that they did what we needed, they weren't ideal but so what, they worked.  IE 6 at home and IE 7 at work were my default browsers.

I went to a seminar earlier this year about Microsoft future development and the latest version of Visual Studio and .NET 3.5.  Their people were waxing lyrical about everything and how brilliant it was.
Questions from the audience relating to non MS software and interoperability were quickly skirted around - apart from when they were able to mention open standards and interoperability in the context of their current or forthcoming products.

I came away with a feeling that despite what they said, they were trying to increase vendor lockin (possibly due to an increase in use of open source and free software) and really didn't care about what was happening to other companies, unless they were interested in buying software written by MS.

This felt uncomfortable to me, I really didn't want to get further sucked into reliance upon tools and technologies under the control of a commercial giant whose only real interest was getting money from people willing to pay them.

A few months later I went to one about developing applications in MS Office.  I do this a lot already, I went to this because I need to think about moving them to 2007 in the near future.  Their opinion was basically that VBA was dead and new development should be done in a .NET language, preferably C#. Yet to do this, you need to buy Visual Studio and VSTO - cost approx £1500. Why would anyone do this when the VBA editor and help files are included out of the box in your office installation?

I made a note that evening to see what was out there, installed Firefox at home and have never looked back. I installed it at work the following day.  So far I've found three at work that only work in IE, found bugs in a piece of commercial software at work that was only uncovered by running it in FF and posting contents of the page to the W3C HTML validator (currently with the vendor's helpdesk to fix).

I've found that its a lot faster than IE and seems a lot more secure (have even uninstalled IEtab to get "failed to invoke Internet Explorer" out in case they find a way around that) on a few sites.

These so called "open" protocols such as LDAP that Microsoft use I've tried using tools against eDirectory servers and found that they don't work - because MS have twisted the format of the results slightly.
Slightly off topic, and I've discovered its not possible to do LDAP authentication over SSL against an AD domain controller - ie credentials pass over the network in plain text, so be warned anybody doing this.

In combination with the other items such as the result of the MS antitrust case in Europe (and their response to it), plus muscling in on territory owned by other companies and writing software for "obsolete" systems (Silverlight player for Windows 98 - pardon), I'm now seriously looking at means of minimising use of Microsoft controlled technologies as much as possible for both myself and my employer.

And all because I went to a Microsoft seminar to promote their own products.

Since then I've also installed OpenOffice but its not progressed quite so far because I'm not yet a master of programming OpenOffice apps.