you wrote:

You actually depend on Microsoft for your lively-hood? Truly and really?


The company I work for uses mostly MS stuff, they do pay me so that makes the answer to your question yes

except that the company got along fine before it used MS and if the decision is made to drop MS (not likely, imo, but I don't have a say) the company will still be here

all our major data is in Oracle running on Sun
so no hyper-paranoid MS lock-in could keep us from our data

all spreadsheets and text documents would survive the end of MS

if a few PowerPoint or Publisher docs were lost, who would really care
once Office 2007 is rolled out, they will all become PDFs if they are important anyway

we all know that MS is the largest s/w company in the world so why the surprise that someone or some organization is using MS

A