But in the meantime, Firefox will continue to get better and MS won't catch up with new features in further versions of Firefox until IE8 which, based on the current release cycle, shouldn't be out for quite a long time. Until then, nerds will continue to convert their relatives and friends, who will in turn convert even more average people. In the end, Microsoft will be screwed.

The bottom line is that the open source development model works too well. New features that users will love can be implemented in an open source project much too fast for Microsoft to ever catch up.