I always avoided Naim I think mainly because how they were advertised. I never had bought anything by Cyrus as did not like the aesthetics. I never tried Aracam or Meridian in my system either but no real reason for not trying them.

Yes, I had a rational bias against both Linn and Naim, too! Though, I did own a Naim CDI for a long time, it was a competition prize and I woukd never have bought it.

I used to feel the same about their cars.

Now I know they are much better made than German cars.

If we're going to talk models, the Naim DBL were truly one of the most awful speakers I've ever heard, on more than one occasion. They did a very good emulation of cheap party speakers.

Had we known about Deming and the way the Japanese took to it we could have seen it coming

I have avoided Naim having heard several systems with Naim amps, their sound was not for me, I avoided Linn mainly because a friend purchased an LP12 and he advised me and a friend not to buy one as at the time a Pink Triangle gave a better result for the money. 

Hating Micro$haft with every fibre of my being is, in no way, irrational, and I will set fire to anyone who says it is!!!!!!!!

Just kidding.

Maybe.

This thread reminds me of the good old days of digital art and 3d modelling.  Those who used Macs would get very VERY annoyed with us PC users because their machines were first to the table, and Macs were widely adopted as the standard professional tools in digital graphics, and digital type-setting, industries.  PC's not only caught up, but because of their larger share of the marketplace, overtook the Mac in many cases.  That really annoyed them, and of course a lot of PC users enjoyed poking them with a (digital) stick over it.

Take Photoshop: Photoshop was initially only available on the Mac. Then, in 1993, Adobe's chief architect ported Photoshop to Microsoft Windows. The Windows port led to Photoshop reaching a wider mass market audience as Microsoft's global reach expanded within the next few years.  This story was echoed by many other pieces of "industry standard" software, and in fairly short order "original" PC programs were developed too, and in many cases ported to Macs.

To Mac owners us PC users would always be brash young upstarts, and to us PC bods, Mac users were living in the past.  Both views were, of course, utter rubbish.  Having worked in a digital art studio it was immediately obvious to me that both Macs and PC were being used in the same environment, on the same network, and files coukld quite happily be formatted for transfer between the two machine types, and between two different artists working on the same piece.

The war still raged on over the forums though, and "war" is not too strong a word either.  Flame wars proliferated for a long while before, eventually, cooling down.  Total irrational brand bias. People using the same piece of software on Macs and PCs would even argue that their version was superior. DUH!

As an admin on a digital art forum it was often a case of pulling them apart and holding them up by their collars, metaphorically speaking, obviously, and then banging their heads together.  Pretty soon word got around that we were not to be trifled with, and starting Mac v PC flame wars was not conducive to long-term membership of our forum. 

Not so much forgotten as ignored, Adrian.    They were never at the races, professionally speaking, and to extend my creaking metaphor even further, it was only ever a two-horse race.

It doesn't matter how good a computer is, as it sounds like you found out, it's industry uptake and available software that will probably end up defining it.  Dare I say it?  It's horses for courses.

All the while the first shiny new Macs were being introduced to the workplace, banking was still being run by IBM machines with paper tape and punch cards programmed in RPG. Machine shops were running lathes and routers via lumps of prehistoric iron quite happily stuck in the land of Fortran. 

Until something much simpler, cheaper, more compact, more easily maintained, etc. and preferably more than one of those at a time comes along in a form that will increase output, cut wages, and with a decent and a demonstrable initial purchase cost recoup time, if it ain't broke, don't fix it has usually been industry's motto.  It often takes a real seismic shift to drive a revolution, and that's what happened with the PC and the Mac in typesetting, layout, advertising, and any other industry they could gain a foothold in, and once they had a foothold...

UNIX is the only other box that gives them a bit of a run for their money. and the UNIX/LINUX machines are usually locked in a discrete cupboard somewhere, and only those of us with the official pointy wizards hat (the special one, with the propellor on,) are allowed access to the key. 

A dislike of Steve Jobs, a severe allergy towards religious-like followers and an entirely rational dislike of MacOS and, even worse, the walled-garden horror that is iOS has always kept me a healthy distance away from Apple.