I tried Office 2007 for some months and i really love it. The ribbon let's you find task faster than ever since its context sensitive and you don't need to remember hundreds of menus and submenus.

I also tried Vista and i love it!!! The Vista Firewall is amaizing, it will make most personal firewall vendors go out of the market. Now the firewall is able to detect where you are connected and set the firewall rules based on that. The GUI is amaizing, of core is well behind MAC but the price range is completly different.

And i also love the tag in document and the indexing that let's you find what you want in seconds.

Basically i believe this OS will rock the house. Of course it will take 2 years, since there are some upgrades in RAM and Video needed and of corse there's a learning curve as allways. There was one between DOS and Windows 3.1 and between that one and 95/98/XP.

And by the way Microsoft isn't a monopoly. It could be a "de-facto" monopoly, but that's just because almost everyone buy their products. But you can run every linux distribution you want, buy a Mac or a Unix one, that's you decision.