MSFT needs this more than ever. With Windows OS virtually in stand still (pahleez - nothing in Vista 2 is new), WinMo hardly making news, people moving to diverse personal computing environments and devices - This is one technology that can be extended to all systems (desktop, laptop, netbooks, tablets, mobile, set-top boxes) and continue to deliver MSFT based products, especially the future of Azure. I thought it was strange for Google to announce so-called Chrome OS so pre-maturely, but now I can understand. Personally I'll stick with WebKit. All the proprietary plug-ins hopefully will become obsolete.

According to Apple's design guru Jonathan Ives, Apple don't do focus groups. Seems to me Apple just do what they (Jobs) think the user want and best damn way possible and let the world judge them. With Apple there is a coherent philosophy to their overall final product. Lumping Open Source all together is your first problem. Just the different Linux distros have different approach and design philosophy to begin with. How do you expect the final "look-and-feel" polish to be the same on all apps and harder still - hardware integration? Say most OS advocates are computer savvy geeks like pro drivers are geeks about race cars. A professional racer's idea of dashboard and controls can be quite different from your average driver on the road. You cannot control a diverse group like the whole OS movement itself. All we can hope is a small group of OS advocates focus on producing a single product that adhere to a single, well-received, consumer user philosophy. One advantage Apple has people always forget too is that they make well designed hardware interface. What users learn to see and touch and they like, they sick with.

MS or M$ - Who cares? If people use M$ you can see their bias right away, which may be a good thing to help you evaluate their position. Should a website thriving on user comments start implementing strict spelling rules? MS also stands for a disease, which I find kind of ironic. So does mono.

Maybe MSFT can copy Linux and make it a live distro so people can try it out before full install... wait, that'll never make them bite. Nevermind.

Nobody cared until somebody started making bank. Then all of sudden everybody wants a piece of the pie.

Maybe exclusive deals should be like drug patents - must expire after some time. Make it 3 years or so.

I second your simple solution and salute you sir! There are only 2 problems (of human nature and society, which are the root cause of all this in the first place) -

1) Most people are too lazy to plant a tree.

2) Major corporations and Wall Street do not make a ton of money from this *solution*.

If you have proposed that it be mandatory for each family to buy a genetically altered tree that will absorb extra carbon and grow extra fast from the new super fertilizer from Mosanto, then, yeah, maybe the bureaucrats' ears will perk up. Then the subsequent soil and water pollution will kill us all anyway. Sorry to say.

I love the fact that despite the mighty MSFT with its VBScript/JScript/.NET, Sun's Java and JavaFX, and Adobe's Flash and ActionScript in combined assult on common, non-plug-in, web standards, JavaScript simply refuses to die and is more popular than ever. Despite the lack of dedicated tools support from major vendors. It shows the majority of web users simply just want a free web browser that works without fuss. How often do you actually hear the majority commenters rave about a total Flash website? How about the other way around? The popularity of Flash has only 2 main reasons - 1) Stream videos (mainly porn) in a way the users cannot download; 2) flashy banner ads only the designers and advertisers themselves love. The vendor tools that supposedly make it *EASY* to develop only make it easy to develop crap. The danger of vendor plug-in is this - if you can view the web and vendor specific content with just the vendor plug-in, why do you need the web browser? Don't let them cripple the web browser or hinder its evolution.

Not logical at all. Apple does not fabricate it's own chips but it's in the hardware business just fine.

If I have an issue setting up my grid and have to call Dell and Oracle and Redhat to find what's wrong with the configuration, alternatives will become attractive. Oracle is in this for the whole stack. Attract and retain customers by simplifying the number of contracts they have on maintenance. Oracle just need to assemble and support the vertical stack. Where the separate parts come from don't matter.

Typical MSFT logic again. The official blog describes 'Bing' as "the sound of found". Problem is - I haven't started looking for anything yet, WHY IS THERE A SOUND? Furthermore, even MSFT admit that to compete with Google you need a name that can become a verb - so WHY DID THEY DESCRIBE 'BING' AS OFFICIALLY A SOUND (which is a noun)?? And then the name keeping chiming in your head - Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing! - like a bad commercial jingle that is stuck there and makes you hate it, despise it, and swear never to touch it - no matter how good it actually is. I'm guessing that would be roughly 50% of the population that MSFT still will not convince.

I think I finally understand what is wrong with Linux - the lack of a truly ruthless, calculating, and multi-talented leader, someone like Jobs for Apple and Gates for MSFT. Linux has geeks, super geeks, ultra geeks, genius geeks, but no geek with brains for business savvy that can create a complete compelling product. None of the FOSS community leaders wants or knows how to lead a company, and the business minded people who started out selling Linux hoping to cashing in a cheap price quickly abandon their principles for a bigger market share with Windows. Windows more user-friendly than Linux? I think it's more like people are trained and conditioned for it. Human nature rather suffers through known abuse than risk the unknown. Most smokers know cigarettes will kill them, but still they cannot quit.

I remember Schwartz on the cover of a major tech magazine a couple of years ago, JDJ, I think, with the tag line underneath that said "The End of Middleware" just as Oracle was starting to heavily push their presence as the middleware platform. Now Oracle is about to own Sun.

Every new version of Windows takes up ever more hard disk space and RAM than before. It's not enough that we get one big ass OS now but you get 2! What happens when you switch into XP mode and install a XP-compatible VM to host another installation of Windows 7? Like standing in between 2 mirrors facing each other...

Yeah but 'X' is so 90s - ActiveX, Macromedia MX, CFX, X-Files, Gen-X... Even OSX will have to evolve pretty soon when 10.7/8/9 eventually gets here (assuming Apple won't skip them). May be MSFT is really hoping that by getting to Windows X quickly people will confuse it for XP and actually pick it up.

That's one tactic I hope field sales reps don't use. MySQL and Oracle have different strengths. Oracle should just kill Lite/Express/whatever. Then first sell Oracle. If customer balk at the price convince them to use MySQL. Oracle should use MySQL to keep customers who may want to move away from Oracle Enterprise because of cost.

Oracle + Sun would be the natural alternative to SQL Server + Windows. Many shops that I worked for used to be Oracle + Unix gradually shifted to MSFT over the last 10 years due to cost and staffing. Streamline the server support contracts and cost would make sense to compete with Microsoft. MySQL can be to Oracle like Sybase to DB2 at IBM, and there's still Postgres and other open source DBs. A play by Oracle might actually bring IBM back to the bidding war and be good for Sun. Right now Sun does not have enough revenue stream that will make enough money to bail itself out. Sun wasted all its energy fighting MS, and failed to see that their real enemy was Intel + Dell.