Re: poor bastard...
I've never thought about Microsoft as being a "monopoly." I'm quite cosmopolitan in my views of systems, and I have a lot of choices. I used a PC with Windows because a lot of my heavy-duty design software needs it. My family uses Macs, and I've very happy with them. I was able to afford Office, but OpenOffice is a very good alternative. It's free, and it runs on almost any platform, not just Linux. My kids got a student version of Microsoft Office for the Mac for a reasonable price, and it came with three legal licenses. Not a bad deal.
I'm running Itunes on my PC. Not Safari, though.