I live in the heavily regulated UK and I have a choice of cable from one provider at 152Mbps, FTTC at 78Mbps from about 6 others or normal ADSL2 at around 17Mbps from about 40 others. The infrastructure (with the exception of cable) is run by the former government monopoly which is required by law to sell access to its network to other providers. The barrier to entry is the expense of creating the infrastructure in the first place which would exist even if there was no regulation.

And they tend not to want to spend huge sums of money rewriting their custom code and rebuying all the third-party stuff, assuming it's even available for Linux or whatever else you think a competitor would be. What are the drop-in replacements for Exchange, SQL Server, .NET, Sharepoint, Dynamics and Biztalk? Migrating away from Blackberry is easy by comparison. There are plenty of MDMs available nowadays, including one from Microsoft.

You missed out Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio and the Dynamics range of products. All of them are making plenty of money.

And config files offer a way to screw up that makes it really hard to find the error, depending on how well the config file is designed. I prefer a combination of both personally. Sometimes it's easier to hack a config file (which Windows has plenty of believe it or not) and sometimes it's easier to do right-click -> Properties and tick a couple of boxes.

Why does point and click make the OS less reliable? In any case there's been a GUI free version for 5 years if you want to put yourself through that.

Chrome doesn't use Webkit anymore.

Artists who don't need to eat I suppose.

Upgrading software isn't free, especially something like IE where each successive version breaks stuff that worked in the previous one.

IE11 breaks loads of third-party apps and doesn't play nicely with some of Microsoft's own software like older versions of Sharepoint and Dynamics. I'm always tripping over IE11 issues at work and having to use Chrome instead because somehow the other browser makers seem to be able to not royally screw things up every time there's an upgrade. I'm not looking forward to IE12. At least the developer tools finally allow you to choose which Javascript file you want to look at rather than having to move through all the entries of a very unfriendly drop-down.

I trust the technology. I don't trust the people implementing it.

World of Warcraft is in the cloud? Guild Wars 2 is in the cloud? There are cloud versions of every single piece of software that businesses depend on? There's cloud device drivers?

The whole school system of Birmingham? I think you might be exaggerating slightly. It was a few schools and has been nipped in the bud. Don't bother posting any Daily Mail links please. I live in Birmingham. I also was allowed into Star City recently despite being an infidel just in case you feel like posting that load of old crap as well. Let me ask you a question Mr OMG BRITAIN IS A MUSLIM COUNTRY. What branch of Sharia Law would approve of the recent gay marriage law?

The EU didn't just "levy" a fine, Microsoft were found guilty in a court of law and spent years appealing and then refusing to comply with the judgement leading to their fine being massively increased.

You are mistaken.

Because that worked out so well for Steve Jobs.