What I like to call Moore's Law of Training sustains Microsoft's software monopoly.

Of course, there is no such thing. That's the point. Learning to use anything new is a bear. You need a lot of motivation to make a change, and you know you're going to lose time from your work while you make that change.

Given this fact, it's amazing anyone ever changes anything at all.

Which leads me to a story....

A few months ago I switched to Mozilla's Firefox as my browser. The transition is not yet complete. On the page where I author these notes, basic features like underline don't yet work with Mozilla. The Google toolbar for Explorer is much more efficient than the equivalent feature of Mozilla. (I especially like the Autofill feature for my credit card data during Christmas shopping season.) And Explorer still has passwords and cookies that have yet to move over.

The switch to Thunderbird, however, is harder. You can run two browsers. When you try to run two e-mail clients your inbox gets all cranky.

For the most part the transition here has been surprisingly smooth. Thunderbird has tools for moving everything over quite smartly. It found my old Inbox, but since that's in a non-standard location (don't get me started on that) it also let me start a new inbox (and folder system) from scratch.

But, again, there are going to be some hiccups.

1. I can't find a way to add a signature file in Thunderbird, so my outgoing mail feels naked. (Correction. I just found it in an account tab.)
   
2. I had to change defaults on each account to let Mailwasher (my own junk filter) do its thing. Apparently Thunderbird has its own filter, and while it learns its business I get to have spam in my inbox again.
   
3. Filters have to be created separately for each account, so my RSS feed (which was set-up to work with Outlook Express and is thus a set of e-mails) now clutters my inbox. There's an RSS feature I can probably enable, but I'll need help from Newsgator on that.
   
4. The help files for Thunderbird, which was just released this week, are pretty primitive.
   

But it's going to take time, and I've already lost this whole morning....