I enjoy how you seem to be claiming that those that are being layed off are "dead wood" and generally cause a decline in production.

Firstly, most of these companies are seeing a decline in revenue primarily because people (consumers and companies) have less to spend on products and services, not because these struggling companies are actually producing less.

Secondly, if it is because people have less to spend which is causing the economic issues (very very very simply put), then laying people off is only compounding the over all problem.

It's my opinion that laying people off is a greed move. At the very least, it's a lazy, non-creative move. The idea is to SPEND. Get the money flowing. If a company isn't producing something that keeps them "riding the edge" without layoffs then they need to brainstorm for new products to draw in the buyers in these hard times. New buyers keeps the company and its employees in business. Employees with jobs spend more.

In any case, on the MS vs. Linux Vs. Apple front, regardless of the market share distributions, seeing the proud and powerful Microsoft laying people off means the rivals are doing significant damage. The world ~needs~ computers. They are an ABSOLUTE necessity! If Microsoft was as dominant as they want to claim, they wouldn't be so hard hit, even during these times. Governments need computers. Businesses need computers; in the US, in the UK, in Russia... everywhere. I don't think we're seeing the total decline of Microsoft, but I do foresee a significant humbling on their part.

I don't want DRM. I want to be able to pay my $.99 for a single song (mp3, flac, ogg, aac, etc, etc) and I want that song to play on each and EVERY SINGLE ONE of my digital multi-media capable devices. The one and ONLY limitation should simply be the available codecs on those devices.

That same philosophy holds true in my desire for video products as well. I don't want the DVD publishers to convince me to spend an extra $5 on a DVD with a "digital copy" of the movie that I can't play on anything other than !!ONE SINGLE WINDOWS MACHINE!! The ability to simply burn the movie off the DVD (a very very simple task) makes the DRM of the "digital copy" that much more infuriating!

As an average customer, a non-audiophile and a non-videophile, I want the grand unification of digital multi-media. I want it all to work on ANY digital multi-media player ~I~ want to play it on! Unless I explicitly "rented" the media, I want to play it WHENEVER and HOW EVER OFTEN ~I~ want to!

And what of piracy? With DRM or without, piracy will still be there. If the world went completely DRM free, piracy wouldn't be much different. You go to purchase the media file (say, off Amazon or iTunes) and the file is clean. No viruses. Nothing that will harm your system. Even if that same media file was found on a p2p network, how do you know it hasn't been infected? It's simply safer to buy it.