Netbooks and Ubuntu (Score 2, Insightful)

In many situations the OS matters less and less. If you're providing a public terminal with Firefox, for instance, it doesn't matter anymore if it's Linux or Windows. Add to that the success of netbooks and all of a sudden we've proven that Linux on the desktop is a viable solution. That probably scares MS more than anything else. If your mom and millions of other casual users manage to use Linux on a netbook, it's the end of the "Linux is too hard for the casual user" story. Ubuntu is specially scary for MS because of it's increasing popularity. One of Linux's major weaknesses is the fragmentation of the market. It's a pain for both hardware manufacturers and software developers. You need to test too many different versions. If Ubuntu becomes the dominant distribution that you can test against, there'll be more and more commercial and hardware for Linux. That's really scary for MS. It's time for some FUD.