Re:It's not about the 'web browser' anymore (Score 1)

I disagree. I think the salient point is in fact that it isn't about the OS anymore. If you look at Microsoft's strategy over the last decade, they're actively looking to get out of the desktop OS market. They've dropped out most of their core technologies into add-ons (Active Directly, Media Player technologies, COM+, etc), most of their cash is derived from non-OS sources, and they're pushing more into the high-end server market. Evidently, desktop OS's are very expensive for a company to produce and maintain, and there isn't really terribly much more blood that can be wrung out of that stone anymore. Microsoft spent US$10 billion on their .NET framework, and countless more billion dollars in researching polymorphic UIs to derive an application layer such that their applications can run on any OS (in theory, at least). That means they can translate their Office product (and others) to every OS. In essense, Microsoft has forseen the death of Windows. It won't neccessarily die because it is or isn't inferior but just because Linux is free, and developing so rapidly. It *is* still about the browser because I forsee the day when the chosen OS won't be important anymore. If Microsoft can get the .NET framework ported to every major platform and get IE running on top of it, then one version of IE will rule them all, so to speak. At least, that's the plan as I see it.