| famousringo said: I don't see how limiting yourself to the tiniest of niches can result in anything other than stagnation and atrophy. I used to love Square in the PS1 days. @ disolitude re: OS market Lousy analysis countered with lousy analysis. Windows is far from dead, but Vista is cannibalizing XP installs. Not a big deal, except Linux and Mac OS are also eating XP installs. Microsoft's goose has stopped laying golden eggs, and you can bet Ballmer is sweating over it. |
Ballmer may be sweating a lot (he's a sweaty guy), but MS isn't really in danger of losing their golden goose anytime soon. Windows will continue to hold 90% of the market for a long time -- Linux may become more accessible to the power user and very advanced users, but it's not making real inroads to regular home users. Arguably, it's doing worse than ever.
Apple is in no danger of succeeding in the low end and even mid range market because they simply do not compete with Dell on price. You can compare system specs until you're blue in the face (you can't buy non-xeon branded Apple towers, AFAIK), but $1000+ on a dell system is high end for Dell with a decent display and you can get systems with displays at the low end for only a few hundred.
As computers sell, so do Windows licenses. That's just how it goes. This comes from a long time linux user and unix admin.
