Then they must be doing a pretty bad job. The revenue of EDD is half of OS/Office. Yet the profit is 1/40th. If anything they really need to figure out how to drive down costs.

Yes, I was suggesting a situation between little and big help, at some moments it was more important than now, but, I agree, not the biggest. It's still big, though, but quite difficult to quantify, with tens million hardcores, tens million casuals, tens million retrogamers, an indefinite number of pirates of all these kinds and probably hundreds million utterly casuals, playing the games provided with Windows, flash games and little else, often pirated. Windows, anyhow, benefits from all the regular players and even from those pirates that mostly play pirated 3rd party games.

Linux currently is manageable using the GUI with the few exceptions, for example, of some partially supported peripherals (for my scanner, for example, SANE required to copy its firmware from the Windows drivers CD, but I could even find the exact command line to do it, so even for a newbie it was matter of copying from the browser and pasting into a terminal window. It could have been done even using only graphical interfaces, but it's faster using a command line and in Ubuntu, that disables root account, also easier. This done, XSane is easier, more comfortable and more powerful than the Windows driver). But regarding printers, Ubuntu, like other easy distros, is easier than Windows: if the printer is supported, and most are, in most cases you just plug it in, without even the need to download the drivers or install them from CD. SW updates are managed in a centralized and homogeneous way, with a single program that can update the entire system, OS, drivers, programs, while on Windows you have MS Update for MS SW and various setup programs for drivers and 3rd party SW. On Linux only a few and rare updates require to restart the system, and it's always been so for years.

Things have changed a lot in the last two years, on my portable, installing a Kubuntu 7.10 required a lot of googling, man pages, trying and command line, but later, installing Kubuntu 9.04 required less effort than installing Win XP on my desktop, and only little more effort than installing the same distro on it.

DOS was command line, with a lot of commands similar to Unix ones, nevertheless people managed to use it. Configuring it when programs needed as much free conventional RAM as possible wasn't by any means easy.

MS needs new exclusive IPs for the 360. A PC would have easily sold more than enough to justify the cost, but canceling it helps the 360.

Pfft, all sequels too. Fail.

I h8 teh sequelz that aren'ts on teh Wii.

As a 360 hater, I'm just trying to make poorly planned arguments into flamebait. Yet I fail at it. I just start to hate franchises after the 4th or 5th game. But oh if Nintendo does it, it's perfectly okay. Ugh, I'm such a hypocrite.

I hate things that are good.

Yep it does seem like since Halo 3, Microsoft Game Studios stopped publishing 360 games on the PC. Unlike Microsoft, most first-party and second-party Sony developers don't have the PC gaming background that Microsoft's first and second-party developers do. Aside from Quantam (whom have that PC gaming background and Heavy Rain started out as a PC game), they are mainly console game developers. That's why the "console exclusive" is a pretty rare thing for a Playstation title unless it's an MMO or something.

But with the Xbox 360, the game development background and culture is different. The Xbox 360 attracts a lot of historically renowned PC game developers (Valve, Bioware, you name it), including on the first and second-party front. Bungie are known for being Mac and PC game developers. Epic are known for PC games. Remedy PC games. Lionhead PC Games. Molyneaux in particular is seen as a legend in PC gaming circles for his many past works (though also a controversial figure for over-hyping games like Black and White and Fable).

I'm quite positive Alan Wake won't be ported to PC. Microsoft Game Studios are not going to go back on their recent "publish PC games for the Xbox 360 exclusively" policy. Because it works so well. The more franchises exclusive to the Xbox 360, the more reasons gamers have to buy an Xbox 360. Alan Wake will be another reason.

And Halo, Halo 2...

Just like Sony, MS didn't predict Nintendo huge comeback (but it could predict HW problems it had rushing XB360 release). It focused all its plans on hitting Sony as hard as possible, but Nintendo stole its thunder reaping almost all the fruits MS wanted for itself. Then the crisis slowedthe market down enough to prevent MS from widening the gap from Sony too much.

Anyhow, yes, when MS can use its monstrous financial strength, but not its prevailing position or near monopolies, it's not so strong, it hit Sony seriously, but not deadly, and results are puny compared to the efforts. And as Sony wasn't hit deadly, now it has the opportunity for a comeback too, although smaller than Nintendo's, and this time knowing more MS tactics (it's quite evident in most of recent Sony actions).

OTOH, Nintendo got awesome results with big creative efforts, but little financial ones, and what's more funny, it's not trying to hit anyone by any means, it just invented a brand new market, kept the share it had in the old one and the overall result is huge. Not focusing on hitting a foe, like MS does, but just minding its business, Nintendo doesn't divert resources from its main goals, MS does because it's paranoically contorted and always devises its plans with a by-end, usually hitting competitors, this, if it even works, can easily damage the main goal, while Nintendo's way gives the desired results and can sometimes hurt competitors as a side effect, sometimes else not affect them at all, but the thing is not actively sought at main goal's expenses.

Being forced to fight MS, though, Sony too won't be able to get the same results as Nintendo.

@Alba
It was over a year ago I last used Ubuntu. when 8 first came out.
Sounds like it has improved in the area I wanted it to. It's complexity with its command lines really help it back in my opinion but as they have worked on that maybe it can finally challenge MS and move on from the "I hate MS so i'll use this instead" users and start to be adopted by the wider market.

I fully understand what MS is trying to do and what they were hoping to do. I also understand their OS/Office marketshare will drop by itself, however doing what they are diong now does not seem to be the best decision. I mean, a Windows7+Office07 (soon to be '10) costs, at the least, as much as the most expensive SKUs out there. That means that for every Xbox sold they must have given up, in a best case scenario, one person who buys a Windows+Office. Somehow, I don't believe that to be true, and remember that's the best case scenario for them.