He may have meant he hasn't seen a BSOD that was explicitly the fault of Windows or a MS application, in which case his claim is not at all surprising. I've seen exactly one in the last four years that I could positively identify as an OS issue; the vast majority of all the others stemmed from bad hardware (usually memory) or drivers, some were from malware and a scattered few were traced to poorly-written/misbehaving applications or ancient programs for Win9x that weren't meant for the NT kernel.

When our users can't run their apps on it -- not because of any inherent problems with those apps, but with MS's decision to change the codebase significantly such that apps just flat-out break -- it's a failure. When my fellow geeks and I spend four times as long troubleshooting a serious problem on a Vista box that it turns out is caused by some completely unnecessary change in the way Windows works under the hood, it's a failure.

I run XP for games on a dual-core system with a monster video card and 4 GB RAM -- which is more than 32-bit XP can handle, but that's irrelevant because it's also far more than what my games demand. I keep my system patched and have all the bells and whistles turned off except for font smoothing. All my games and a few non-game apps on it work, beautifully. On top of that it is MUCH faster than my Debian/KDE install in almost every way (much to my chagrin). Sit there with a straight face and tell me I'd be wiser to move to Vista.

Line of business apps that you don't just buy off the shelf, don't run natively on Linux and aren't supported in WINE for obvious reasons.

Yeah, all the users I support (roughly 300-400 spread across about 25 different businesses) pirated all their software. They all got together one night and had a massive torrent party and downloaded a bunch of keygens and had white zinfandel and snacky cakes.

Look, I love my Debian and FreeBSD at home, and the Redhat in the few places in my field where I actually come across it, but small business users need to work on their actual work, not their golf swing or their nails while I'm spending four hours trying to get ImportantSoft installed in WINE when it installs and works in Windows XP in about 10 minutes.

Nothing would make me happier than if our shop officially supported Linux and FOSS apps, but my happiness doesn't pay the bills and it's sure not going to spread itself to the end users who know their software's ins and outs and don't have time or money to spend a week or more learning all new stuff. Sad, too, because SMB is a market that's screaming for Linux adoption right now.