Stephensen has been stepping incrementally closer to being a literature author with each book he's written. Snow crash is fluff, Cryptonomicon is pretty deep, and the Baroque Cycle is a master work (in the original sense). Anathem is his first post master work book.

Many posters have made the claim: "It would be better if you removed X", for various values of X. What is instructive is that not everyone agrees on X. Stephensen had a lot to say in this book, on many topics.

I'll address a few things here, but this list isn't exhaustive:
* Unresolved plot elements are not bad. Only in very bad fiction does absolutely everything happen in service of the ultimate confrontation. Some things just happen, and we learn about the characters in how they deal with them.
* Characters exist for themselves, not the plot. If every character was there 'for something', this would be a (bad) video game, but it isn't, its a book.
* The ultimate conclusion of the book is that intellectuals have a duty to the world to remain engaged. The first half (roughly) of the book exists to convince you that being segregated would be lovely, while the second half drives towards the negative consequences of that approach. The character development and the plot both work to develop this theme over time.

Considering the number of enterprise companies that have invested in Linux and do exert some influence over kernel development(IBM, Oracle) and I don't see Apple letting Dell, HP, or IBM build XServes I don't see this happening. Does Apple make a good, stable product? Yes. Is their client (desktop version) more user friendly than Windows or Linux at this point? Yes (I use all 3, Macbook being less than a month). Will Apple carve out a decent chunk in a few different markets? I hope so but I don't see them moving linux out of the data center.