Microsoft will not lose the desktop market (Score 1)

No matter how bad longhorn is, it really doesn't matter. It could be guaranteed to crash at startup, and it wouldn't matter. People would simply stick to XP. They aren't going to switch to Linux because they think Windows is firmware and aren't aware of the existance of Linux. You can't choose something if you don't know it exists. If food at a resourant isn't on the menu, and I don't know they have it, I'm not going to pick it. We should be realistic here. Take a look at the W3Schools statistics on operating systems. Windows has over 90% of the market. That's an awfully large portion for a company that's supposably losing. Yes, Linux and Mac are increasing, but it's happening so slowly that it might as well not be happening at all. Then you have to consider W3School's target audience, and how Windows likely has a much larger percentage than this. I don't know about other markets, but with the desktop market - all Microsoft needs to stay alive - they don't even have to release new operating systems. They could halt development of even security updates for 20 years and it wouldn't matter. I really don't think there's a hope. As far as Firefox is concerned, all it takes is for Microsoft to see things grow enough that they decide "Ok, that's enough, we're going to stop it now" and Firefox is history. Thinking that IE can be defeated if the market share shrinks small enough doesn't make any sense, because IE didn't have it's nice market share to begin with, and it still won. All it has to do is bribe away the companies defending Firefox, maybe hire some of the Firefox developers, or perhaps even block Firefox from installing on Windows, and they've got their 90% back. So long as Microsoft keeps it's dominance in the desktop OS and browser markets, they will never go away. Don't get me wrong, I don't want Microsoft around either, but I'm more pessimistic (sp?) than most.