MS is facing tougher competition in several areas now

[Alby_da_Wolf]

slowmo said:

cory.ok said:

slowmo said:

cory.ok said:

their os is going downhill too, they are already palying catchup with ubuntu, and ubuntu is coded by community and distributed for free.  now that we have reached the physical limit in the amount of transistors that we can add to one board computer components will drop in price a lot faster than they have been in recent times.  predictions have been that windows will start to be 15-20% of the cost of all computer within the next few year (it already is ~20% the cost of most computers sold).

when that happens theres a lot of predictions saying linux will reclaim a lot of territory that windows had taken from them

Ubuntu making inroads, Seriously???  I've heard this crap for 10 years and I still don't see these big inroads happening.  Vista was a chance for Os's like Ubuntu to make their move, it just didn't happen (and in Ubuntu's case likely never will).

in the last 8 years it has seen growth in 92 of 96 months.  you know what also didnt happen during vista? people using it.  during vistas peak marketshare (of about 18%) windows xp had about 70% marketshare still.  infact windows xp marketshare never fell below 70% until after windows 7 released (and is still about 50% lol)  microsofts os buisness hasnt been going good

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.

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.