Comment At the end of the day... (Score 3, Insightful) 303
They will try, but at the end of the day, the Microsoft walled garden will always have the gate left open.
Just the other day we setup a client with a delegate mailbox so she had two inboxes in her Outlook profile. Problem is, the pop-up notification only works with her primary inbox, not the other one. There are a bunch of hacks out there using VBScript and Win32 pop-ups, but they're nothing like the Outlook one (can't click on message, for example).
Instead, Microsoft puts their money behind such memorable hits like, "Where'd My Message Headers Go?". In Outlook 2003, you could right-click on the message and go to Properties. In Outlook 2007, it was right-click, Options, now it's under the abysmal Home Button thingy > Options, and you have to have the message opened to do. I'm sure some fanboi is going to jump on here and tell me of some other way to open it, but the point is, I don't want to learn new ways to do the same thing; we spend enough time in IT learning new technologies that UI distractions like Microsoft fobs off on us are unwelcome and counterproductive.
Will my MacPorts install continue to work after installing a new major OS release or migrating to a new machine with a different CPU architecture? In general the answer is no. See Migration for how to get things working again.
Ubuntu:
do-release-upgrade
...
apt-get install $package
There's a 99% chance that will Just Work (tm). The other 1%, well, likely something's not right to begin with (wrong apt sources, etc.) or it's an edge case.
Look, I love my Macbook, but I choose to run VirtualBox with Windows 7 and Ubuntu because I feel that while it does a great job of some things, it's poor at best at other things in comparison to other OSs. One of those things is having a core, reliable package management system: when it's time to release some new code and/or configuration changes for a client, I don't want to get burnt by a 3rd-party package system not working as expected.
"History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions." -- Ted Koppel