You're right that Office is in my opinion a true monopoly that Microsoft fostered and were allowed to behave badly with.  In fairness there was too many companies working to grab that monopoly rather than being altruistic and contributing towards a common standard file system that all office products would use.  In effect through brute force Microsoft have made their formats the business standard and it's a license to print money.  I wonder if they could have achieved this if the internet had been more prevalent earlier so people would have had access to applications such as Open Office earlier. 

The Ipad is a perfect example of a device taking vunerable market share from Microsoft as they really have no answer at this time to it.

You're true about the lack of format unification efforts by MS competitors, it took Sun, that had very little interest in the office suite business itself and a lot more in breaking MS' "siege", to create OpenOffice by releasing as open source StarOffice's code. Internet wasn't so small, but most of the open source community was still totally happy with text files for the simplest text documents and TeX and LaTeX when careful publishing was needed (BTW when printed documents publishing style uniformity is desired, for example in universities for theses, articles, papers, etc, and outside of professional publishing environments like print shops, LaTeX is still king).

You're exactly right.  Those are major initiatives that prove they are not sitting pat.

And that's what I don't get about all of this doom and gloom talk.  As big and successful as MS has been and is, why would people think they would just sit back and let other companies take their bread and butter?  ALL of these companies are very competitive, none of them are going anywhere.

The issue is that when you're that big its hard to move the needle on profits/revenue. I mean oil companies struggle to increase profits without market expansion, which is what Microsoft has relied on.

Anyway when you're at near 100% market share, its easy for someone else to increase share by taking over a niche. On the other hand when you have near 100% share its also hard to increase it.

I could care less about your first statement(I am not a "techy" type person, so the differences seem to be negligible to me).  As for your second statement, I could not disagree more. As for the competition, consumers win, because those companies will lower prices and make better products.

ubuntu has been rising almost as fast as apple has been, they are drops those months but theyre pretty small (0.1-0.2%)

i dont think business want to stay at a secure platform (ubuntu is much more secure than any windows device btw), rather i think they just dont want to pay for new machines.  xp requires like 64mb ram while vista requires 1gb

even if businesses wanted to downgrade their 256mb ram machines to vista they couldnt, xp was leaps and bounds better than their older os', it was a good investment to upgrade, vista not so much, 7, not so much.  linux?  linux gives everything that windows 7 does (and more), for free and without the system requirements.

I was just having a bit of fun. :P

Lets see just how secure Ubuntu is then when it's market leader (obviously never going to happen).  And no Ubuntu doesn't do everything Windows does by a long stretch unless you're comparing it to Windows 7 Starter.  As for the smaller system footprint you're quite right, but then again it's to be expected when you're OS isn't as feature rich. 

I seem to recall in the past it has been proven that at times MAC OSX was less secure than Windows and surprise surprise it is based on a Linux/Unix kernel.  I would welcome Linux becoming big enough in market share to dispell it's security myth.

The machines have to fail eventually, OEM rigs aren't exactly using the best quality components around with cheap motherboards and in most cases PSU's.

In regards to OS requirements... If you are running XP on 64mb of ram, then it's going to be a very painfull experience. Optimally you would wan't 256mb or more even for just basic word and email.
Ram is flippin' cheap and a great and easy way to improve a system regardless of OS.

However if you consider Windows XP to be "Leaps and bounds" better than any previous OS... Then I guess you have forgetten it is essentially Windows 2k with a new wrapper?
There is less of a difference between XP and 2k under the hood than there is between Vista and 7.

Now... Linux can do everything Windows 7 can? Hardly, Linux although has come far is still not an OS for gamers even with Wine.
I recently experimented with Ubuntu on my Gigabyte tablet, the OS was fairly quick and painless to use...

However there was no drivers for the touch screen, wireless and the sound card, hunting around didn't result in anything, back to Windows 7 it was... Tried Jolicloud next, same issues.
That ends my attempts of Linux on my Tablet.
Won't even consider anything other than Windows 7 for my desktop as it's primary function is for gaming, with 15 years of games capable of being run on it... Nothing comes near it to suit my needs.

It was cool to bash Windows during the Vista and Windows ME days, but seriously... Windows 7 looks awesome, is compatible with a multitude of hardware and software combinations, relatively issue free and runs on my Tablet with it's Atom n470, 2gb of ram, 120gb SSD, 10.1" touch screen which shows it isn't as resource heavy as one may presume.


I'm glad Microsoft is getting competition in *every* segment, it's going to mean Microsoft will have to Innovate faster with better products to succeed, which is never a bad thing.
However as a company... They aren't going anywhere any time soon.

M$ is teh d0med confirzmed!!!!!!!!!!