You would be wrong on both counts! I actually started using Apple products before they were even known as Macs, just good old IIc and IIe. I also have one machine running Ubuntu, one running a nicely stable CentOS and in addition to a Mac and three different Windows machines. I AM not arguing which platform is better, simply that Linux and Mac have a long way to go to get to where people are with software choices on Windows. Someday they may well bring about the downfall of MS...just not in the near future.

Neither Apple nor any Linux distro is really in the position to displace MS at this time, which is why I estimate 2-3 years. Neither have the software variety that users are used to. Apple has to avoid cheesing off MS to some extent because the Mac version of Office still sells a good number of copies. I know enough Mac users that would get realy annoyed if they had to learn crappy software like OpenOffice or whatever else passes for productivity suites on Mac and Linux. Maybe if this were two or three years from now when Mac actually managed a third to a half of the OS market....

If I were Microsoft I would simply stop licensing Windows for any computer sold in Europe. Why screw around anymore - if people are not smart enough to go out and download a browser of their choice why should the company go through any more time or hassle. This should bring computer sales to a screeching halt until software companies can manage to offer anywhere close to the depth of software that is available for Windows. I figure two or three years anyway. The really interesting part is that this is based on Opera whining. Opera is what? Number 4 in the browser market? Next up they will be whining that Google has to be shut down so they can try to out do Chrome.