I really don't think that common belief is right

As soleron said, Windows just dropped under 90% market share (determined by certain sites tracking the OS of all computers visiting the site), with about 9% for MacOS and 1.5% for all Linux distros.

And Macs are increasing shipments at a much higher rate than Windows based computers. MS is still winning (by alot) but should be worried

well its their only monopoly they have

in games nintendo is kicking butt.

in cellphones nokia OS is raping them.

and it mp3 its less than average player.

blazinhead89 said: Lets hope so , Their PC Monopoly(undeserved) has gone too long untouched

Undeserved? I'm sorry, but we are sitting in the middle of the Information Age and Web 2.0 ONLYE because of Microsoft's doing. If we were left to Apple PC's would be nowhere near the penetration they have today. Gates single-handedly changed the entire world in a matter of two decades, and they deserve every sale they have made along the way. Do you honestly think everyone would have a PC if Apple was left to its bullshit "only our OS on our Hardware" policy? Of course not. Thank god Gates came about and said "here's an OS, pay me a small fee and you can put it on ay hardware you make."

never been a big fan of mac but if it does eventually take over PC i think i will have to become one

No, MS is not threatened by Apple, and won't lose a serious market share anytime soon because of one good reason:

Entry Level PC: $299.00
Entyy Level Mac: $799.00

And the $299.00 PC comes with more memory as well. The average PC generally comes installed with 2gb of RAM.

The Mac will not become mainstream until they stop making the product more expensive than the PC.... and open the gates on a Mac Clone market (the lack of this what has caused Mac to be the fringe computer to begin with, and they've never diverted from this path)

Yes I agree Comrade, Apple needs to open up their OS onto the clone market, they can be more restrictive on their Clone makers (ie certain hardware use only) but they need some more freedom in Mac land to ever breach 10%.

Also I read here http://www.osnews.com/story/20640/Apple_Loses_Some_Shine_as_Mac_Sales_Slow that due to slower economic times the higher priced macs are slowing in sales.

My hope is for linux quite frankly, it's getting much easier to configure than even 1 year ago, and is to the point that lots of people (maybe 10% of the computer market) are smart enough to configure a dual-boot setup.

Yeah, I would like to see Linux take off as well...

The only thing holding it back to this point is that it is too hard for the average user to configure and use, and of course, the lack of software titles that are compatible with it.  I run a dual OS boot myself, with Redhat being my 2nd boot.

Microsoft has just been lazy with Windows over the past few years, especially when they made Vista, and the reason for this is because they never really had any competition so they never had any reasons to go over the top and try to make something amazing. But now that Apple is starting to compete with Microsoft then I can that Microsoft will start kicking it up a notch and will probably take over again.

^^ I think they did try to make Vista awesome (it does have some great features) but they did the same thing that MS always does... release a lightly tested & half-completed product. Vista wasn't ready when it was released, and that hurt them severely.

Certain games won't run yes (in fact 99% of games) however there still are great linux games like Openarena and Warzone 2100.

However, the only thing in linux that doesn't meet my needs in a cross platform video conferencing software (and since my upgrade to Mandriva 2009.0 in skype there have been compatiblity problems with video and audio, and every other alt. i've looked at make my friends install weird GTK and KDE runtime libraries) But the bigger distros Ubuntu, Mint, Mandriva, ect have a vast library of free software, openoffice, firefox, amarok, and a large numeber of very useful applications that can often do more than their windows counterparts.