OP,
Thank you for posting a link to that article. I just had a pleasant intellectual conversation with my wife and son about it. I emailed a link to the article, to my wife's job email account. She just emailed it to her boss and another 10 people in the IT department (she's in IT). She said that someone has or is evaluating Windows 8, but the company has no plans to upgrade to it. Most of the company is still on Win XP Pro with a smaller segment of users running Win 7 and Macs.
Like many others I'm still working in a Microsoft environment. I loath Windows 8, but I don't think Microsoft is or will go away completely any time soon. I doubt they will fade like Kodak. The people working at Microsoft are very crafty.
Here is my tin foil hat suspicion (and pardon my Wall-o-Text)...
===============================
1) If I remember correctly M$ brought the company that swallowed up Novell, thus they have control any Novell patents and intellectual property rights.
2) M$ is known to spawn/spin off separate companies that act as patent/IP holding bins. This allows the holding bin companies to sue companies that make products that challenge Microsoft. Suing can create a financial hemorrhage. This can have a crippling effect on fledgeling companies and cause some to shut down completely.
3) A continuous stream of legal battles and appeals is a form of harassment, but it is totally legal.
4) If the holding bin companies handle the tasks suing and appealing then M$ can't be targeted by governments in anti-trust cases. This is M$ slick way around anti-trust laws.
5) The process of creating holding bin companies, purchasing existing companies and converting them in some way to holding bin companies, and having the holding bin companies do the dirty work of harassing others is puppeteering. M$ is the puppeteer. The holding bins and companies who become swallowed up by M$ or holding bin companies are puppets.
6) If Acer and many other long time M$ business partners started producing sexy Linux based or proprietary OS based smartfone and tablet products you can bet there will most likely be a Tsunami of legal battles and under handed manuvering. However, M$ might be completely shielded from any backlash if the puppets handle the dirty work. The US DoJ would most likely be
and others are likely to go /shrug.
Remember what happened to Lindows, Geoworks Ensemble (defunct competitor to Win 3.11), and Novell? Look at what has transpired between M$ and Nokia, its affect on the Qt development team in Australia and anything that depends on Qt (KDE). It didn't shutdown KDE completely but it "harmed" the KDE development cycle. If anyone was thinking of producing a Linux based tablet product that depended on Qt, they are certainly forced into reconsidering and possibly changing their plans. This could delay a product by an indeterminate amount of time and give M$ time to establish themselves in the market.
Lastly, Mono is M$ .NET for Linux product. Mono means monkey in Spanish. What if we take the word "mono" and place the word "wrench" after it? See definition #2 at Urbandictionary if you don't understand the resulting phrase -->
http://www.urbandictionary.com/defin...=monkey+wrench
