What vendor support contract will get you your personal bug fix-it team? You obviously never worked with Microsoft and their support, or you're in a Fortune 500 that can spend couple of millions yearly to get that level of support (i.e. you're one of the reasons why regular users get regression bugs or idiotic functionality since you have the money to make the vendor cut updates to suit your fancy). In the real world (of small and medium companies, you know, where most IT people actually work), your best served by a small vendor, preferably local, that considers YOU an important customer. And provided that he employs some developers himself for him the best model is Open Source since he can tailor it to his customers needs.

Perhaps... but I beleive it's the concentration of open-walleted investors and the whole VC concept that made Sillicon Valley what it is. There are smart people everywhere in the world. If concentration of uber-smart people was THE requirement it would have been, say, Mumbai, but Indians are skint and famously mingy so it's not. Those brilliant global PhDs wouldn't concentrate in SoCa if weren't for the money that was very willing to mobilize.

It's still so. It's still much easier to get funding if your start-up's addy is in the vincinity of SF bay area even tho you can do great things everywhere. Sadly, in many cases underfunded ventures don't go anywhere. There is a whole history technically superior products originating outside SV and failing mostly due to underfunding. The times are changing tho, internetization and production outsourcing to China democratized the market, and OTOH many policy makers in EU for example are understanding the need to angel fund tech startups, which is why there are now more successful tech companies coming from EU than ever.

My office has a Macbook Pro, three Windows boxen (two on XP, one on 7), two Linux Mint boxes (a desktop and a laptop) and three Xubuntu desktops. Two CentOS servers running VMs for our business software, a Linux based VOIP PBX, a Linux based router, a Linux based WiFi box.. one iPhone, four Android phones, my old defunct HTC Beatle (iPaq 6515) was running WinCE while it was working tho. All windows boxen run Libre 3.5, we're cheap like that.

But here is pirated-Windows land. Just a couple hundred miles from here is EU. Anecdotaly, a friend of mine works for a small Linux support company in Germany. He says that the number of Linux desktops (and office servers but that was the trend even before) has dramatically increased post 2009 recession.

And yes, Apple probably sells more laptops than any single laptop brand in the world right now.

Similar story in pro-audio.

eMagic was also bought when Logic Audio was a pro/prosumer studio standard, in some parts of the world even more so than Steinberg's or Avid's (ProTools) software. Then they released Garage Band partly based on the same engine but with a more consumer-oriented UI. Then they slowly started adjusting the UI and the very model of Logic (does anyone remember those layouts you could design in Logic) to fit consumer mindset.

But it was for the better in terms of sales, and hurt only a few uber high end users: Logic now competes in prosumer/consumer area with massively selling consumer/amateur software like FL Studio (typically disregarded by professionals but nowadays probably the best selling sequencer and used by large number of dance industries royalty, it earned the company owner a private jet among other things) and not only does it shift units, it also happens to sell quite a few Macintosh boxes to those interested as well.

So someone at Apple noticed the potential of audio prosumer/bedroom musician market and put some energy behind it, dumbed down an industry standard in order to expand the market and still capitalize on the brand, and I'm sure it adds a notch on Mac sales. They might not be no.1 in terms of sales but they are in terms of mindshare (a lot of Apple fanboys who consider only Logic is a proper tool everywhere).

How then do you explain the track record of one judge Lucy Koh in the Apple vs. everybody saga?

The original intent of parents, i.e. not the one patent trolls and their lawyers advertise, was to protect knowledge from being lost/forgotten due to industrial secrecy. The intent was to convert private knowledge into public good in exchange for a limited-time legal protection. The idea was never really to ensure monopoly and especially not income of the inventor, but to prevent inventor from keeping his inventions secret by allowing him to be legally protected for a limited time in exchange for publicly disclosing his inventions.

Which is why software patents are retarded and esp. Apple-style trivial UI patents because the society as a whole doesn't benefit from obvious UI gimmicks being presented in a patent format since, even if they weren't non-trivial and derivative, they would be in plain sight and not a part of otherwise hidden internal functioning. So even if the reasoning behind math and business processes not being patentable are not analogous enough there is additional argument against sw patents.

So the entire system that enforces patents of the latter kind is either dishonest or ignorant about the purpose of patent system. I don't know which of the two is worse as a trait for a judge. At least Common law judges can hide behind precedents (but hide only, they are not as bound by precedents as they are by the intent and purpose of a legal institute), but in civil law jurisdictions it would be unforgivable. Which is methinks why Apple sued Samsung on industrial design rather than patents in Germany.