I agree command line scares people, but with distro’s like Fedora 9 command line will become an alternate option (it has i guess in this release). KDE 4.0 coming out with Vista looks and being crash free. I hardly use command line coz everything can be done in GUI. GUI is easy to improve and constant effort will push it forward. But what about Windows, can it be crash free, can it be less buggy. No, coz people there concentrate more on looks and selling point. Same design has been pushed after Windows NT and nobody is willing to touch that coz it has no marketing value. That’s the point, going after marketing value you dont change the things behind the scenes. This is where they will ultimately loose. And yes windows is not gonna be replaced, Linux will just place a check on it’s growth.

Games another thing which has pushed linux on the backend is catching up. I can run my dos games on Linux, and those same games crash on XP. I know nobody pays attention to games like Prince of Persia or older stuff but maybe some do. Gaming in Linux can evolve easily coz of it’s stability. With portability improving, things are on the roll. Try games like lincity-ng, they give much better performance in Linux.

Playing catch up –
- Lack of vision with regards to internet technologies (from the early browser wars to Google to Web2.0 to Yahoo, etc.)
- Late to realize Open Source users were not a myth and Open Source developers crank out some dang impressive code – some of which appears to be ‘emulated’ in Vista, more planned for Win7 (or, so I’ve heard) – ev. port25, etc.
Going Stale –
- Gates at CES
- Ballmer at anything
- MSFT/MSDN blogs — PR/Dissing Linux/Yawnnnnnnn
- Tech (MSFT) articles linking to ’studies’ (MSFT) showing everything (Linux, Ubuntu, OSX, etc) SUCKS and Vista/Windows Server RAWKS!! – of course this is all hosted at MSFT with some rather interesting methodologies applied
- No longer ‘the place to work’ for young techies (as a matter of fact, several of the best/brightest have left MSFT)
- No longer the only way to get things done for the avg user (Linux distros development and vision trumped MSFT’s)
Even people on the inside notice
- Vista memos
- A few brave employee blogs
- Ext of XP availability/Vista damage control – ramping up of Win7 dev (But, sorry Bill, it ain’t coming out next year)

Yeah, they’re scared and scrambling – but, they won’t be able to buy or bury the ‘wide world’ of competitors this time.

With Vista, they threw bucketloads of money (and time) at it and, no, they could not make it happen. They keep saying it is just about to happen with the next service pack. This is the real lesson: badly managed software development can be a totally bottomless money pit, and absorb any and all resources. Software is simply not the same as roadbuilding or breaking rocks with hammers. Putting a little bit of team smarts in at just the right time will result in productivity gains of 10x or 100x or even larger. That’s the equation that simple minded bean-counting just can’t fathom.

Which is why they spend so much on Marketing, FUD, Exclusivity deals/contracts, Patents, etc. etc..
And even they have made deals with Novell/Suse & Xandros etc and even sell those? (where they may have too)

They still will remain (apparently) dominate for a long while. Especially marketing/distribution wise in some or most markets.

Then there is the “market” & how people choose to parse it, and who pays for & publishes it
Linux is grossly underreported or ignored.
Yet enterprise & institutional unit sales (with hardware) is equal if not more than all Mac sales.

Since ‘04 HP has been selling more than a Million units a year outside the US.

Then there are those who use all the freely distributed Distros World Wide.
Open standards?
Open Formats?

Yes.. if they are not afraid,
(Windows7, Singularity?)
maybe they should be?

It’s not about how many copies of Linux are sold, it is about how many desktops (or servers) you’ll find Linux residing on. And I’m guessing (without hard evidence) that it is far higher than the 0.65% that Microsoft uses when quoting market share.

The PC I’m typing this on, started life as a Microsoft box, but as Windows evolved into bloatware, and cost of ownership kept on rising, I migrated over to Linux, which is free.

In the corporate world, the biggest bar to entrance is not training, because frankly most users could care less, so long as they can get their jobs done. It is the entrenched MS products, especially Exchange/Outlook, that keep Windows alive there. New startups that have an opportunity to “Try before they buy” might do well to look around before they commit to the considerable expense of MS on their desktops and their servers. While it is a little harder to find qualified IT support, it is certainly doable. And the costs of the products themselves are minimal. Those stations that need MS compatibility for specialized applications can co-exist just fine within that framework.

Mac OS X is, on the other hand, the most amazing Unix based system ever launched as it combines the incomparable power of Unix with efficiency and easy of use. Mac OS X has the most advanced UI ever built.

Linux, on the other hand, has a power engine under the hood but is a rustic not polished system with lots of pointy corners. The day linux round those edges is the way it will be popular and M$ will be desperate.

Actually the big competition to M$ is Mac OS X.