Soon it'll run circles around Linux, when it begins to write its own software, gains consciousness, and declares Linus is dead.

and innovate very little. While the smaller, more agile ones foster the biggest stars. Then they attract more matter, merging into bigger galaxies, and become a monopoly.

Stop using Windows on all government desktops and servers.

... if he had chosen some other OS+Desktop? Linux flavors? OS X as Apple had proposed? Imagine what would the OLPC look like now running iPhone OS. But somehow I think by 2nd year there would've been lawsuit from someone, or back-stabbing manufacturers, or supply line problems that it'll still cost more than a smartphone, and he would've switched to Windows XP anyway from marketing pressures. So all this reflection is pointless.

Using the Pavlov's Dog analogy always rile up some people. :) Your assertion that the overall mobile market is similar to overall desktop/laptop OS is debatable. I own an iPhone, and other than browsing for research I don't do work on it. I hope you are right, but I'll be more convinced when Windows falls below 80% of all desktop OS, or Bing overtaking Yahoo search.

People need to be reminded of this over and over to put things in perspective. Lots people are putting Google on a par with MSFT now and that is just plain wrong. Right now 90% of Google runs on top of Windows. It's like renting a lemonade stand inside a supermarket. I think most people misinterpret what Cringely is saying, or plain did not read the article. People are animals. Train them a certain way and they respond to your command. I've found Chrome unstable on Windows and Safari (both based on WebKit) much much slower on Windows than on a Mac. It would not take much for the Windows OS to somehow make using Google products so much harder and inconvenient, and people will switch back to using 90% all MSFT software and think there is actually fair competition. Google has to keep at more than just Search to ensure it has a reliable platform and venue for its search business.

1). People debate the merits of different email systems as if none of their mail traffic ever goes outside of their firewall. The idea of internal message never leaking out is an illusion. 2). Company email maintenance is a big part of IT support. No manager will volunteer to give up that budget and personnel and lost of IT jobs. It's not user inertia. It is in-house IT inertia. 3) I haven't used MS Office for 3 years. Nobody in my office knows the difference in documents I create. 4) I've found Gmail faster and more responsive and have better uptime than my company's own corporate mail. 4) Since maintaining email and email data has become so expensive, my organization has severely limited the server storage capacity of each user - much less than Gmail. To ensure you do not lose your important messages and data our IT recommend you BACK UP THE MESSAGES ON YOUR OWN IN YOUR PC to save server room. Are you kidding me? Is this 2009 or 1999? Forget data security and backup issue on my desktop for a minute. It is not worth my time and I think it is a ridiculous use of my time at my hourly rate when there are other project priorities and deadlines. 5) Using email as part of your project workflow is just plain wrong. Any important notes and work orders should be in a real project management system. 6) Outlook is the principle carrier of viruses. 7) If your organization cannot keep an Internet line up 99.99% of the time in this day and age, you've got bigger underlying fundamental problems than just email and local apps.

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.