openoffice fot the win!! awesome product and free. Anything microsoft have there's always a better (and free) version out there hence why they buy out people because it hurts their cashflow. Oh how the mighty will fall.

PC is better than MAC and X360 is better than PS3.  This is IMO of course. Your first sentence shows how bias to Sony you really are. Stop trying to troll!

TBH this is a great time to have stock in Microsoft. Windows 7 is the fastest selling OS, X360 had its greatest sales year EVER, Kinect sold nearly 8 million units in 1st 2 months, WP7 seems to have good word of mouth and is a good phone OS, Xbox LIVE brings in tons of money from subscriptions and downloadable content,movies etc. & bing is of to a decent start and is not a bad first go for a search engine by any means.

All in all there is more reasons to buy stock in Microsoft right now and less reasons to sell your stock.

Despite not thinking MS is d0med (yet), it's true that increasing capabilities of smartphones and other small portable devices, where Windows CE/Mobile is weaker than most competitors, is doing what the first underpowered Linux netbooks couldn't (also due to incredibly poorly chosen and taylored distros back then): undermining MS Windows and Office power, not competing on PC, where MS is almost unbeatable, but marginalizing the pure Windows PC market by building around it a larger market that doesn't use MS formats and SW. This way, Linux and OpenOffice, despite being a minority on PC, become a part of the majority when it comes to what document formats are used. The first effect is visible in the web browser market share, IE dropped below 50% on PC, and it won't be able to recover anymore, as web browsing is one of the most widespread activities on non-PC devices, so, thanks God, the use of MS proprietary formats and HTML extensions on the web will be more and more counterproductive for web sites, undermining the base of IE power. The same will happen, just slower, for user generated documents, undermining MS Office. MS won't die, but it will finally have to do its best, like it's already forced to do with XB360 and Kinect, to compete. The time of resting on its laurels and monopolies is over.

BTW this explains while there are so many rabid MS astroturfers unleashed around the net, Ballmer must be even more furious than usual.   

I gather you don't understand why businesses are slow to migrate from a secure mature platform to a new one hence why Windows XP is still used.  All I can say on your growth stats is the 4 months it didn't grow must have been some drop offs because Ubuntu really isn't making inroads at all.

Totally agree with you...apart from the MS Server bit.  Linux rules the web server roost and linux servers are rapidly making headway in government and private sectors from US Defence and the Navy Submarine Fleets to the biggest companies in the world, there is even a rumour that MS uses linux servers.

The frontend will always be Windows 7 or any Windows Workstation, but the backend widely used and growing is Linux.

The developing countries (and wanna be superpowers) in Asia are all looking to be technological independent from the US and are developing their own processors and OSes based on different flavours of desktop linux.

MS will most likely rule the West for a long time and make lots more money but in the end when these nations finally develope their own systems  - however far ahead in the future that may be, national pride and the sheer numbers of people in Asia will make linux based systems the top dog...if all goes to plan.

Oh chillax, he's been banned for that comment already.

I totally agree that the most dangerous attacks to MS won't come from Ubuntu. Some are already happening, some others are only delayed compared to when MS feared they'd have started (for example, consoles being able to totally replace home theatre PCs). Finally, most are totally unknown except by those that are preparing them.

About MS succeeding on PC due to competitors' ineptitude: true about financial management, true regarding some products, but false about some other products, Office and its single parts for example defeated far better office suites and single products, Word 6 was the worst, buggiest and most bloated word processor of its times, but survived to better competitors (and to Word 2 competition itself) just thanks to MS brute force. Not to mention that MS was fined quite a lot of times for unfair competition and it almost always preferred to pay the fines and keep on behaving unfairly, as for mysterious reasons, US legal system almost never thretened retaliations as hard as against IBM, for example. Company splitting never was a real danger for MS as it was for some years for IBM, even years after IBM ceased being a potential monopolist, as OS/2 and Smartsuite were still slowed by the fear of antitrust threats while Windows and Office were left free to kill them when MS power on PC market had already become greater than IBM's for years.

Oh yes, it looks like Microsoft's performance is making haters silent indeed.

Hmm, I thought that the announcement of their Windows Media box, and their ARM Windows 8 / Phone 8 unifications whilst difficult could end up as potentially strong growth areas.