For the first time in ages, the sale of new PCs with Windows as a percentage of the PC market is declining sharply. The new winner is the Mac, but, while no one does a good job of tracking the still-new, pre-installed Linux desktop market, it's also clear that Linux is finally making impressive inroads into Windows' once unchallenged market share.

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winbloze is crumbling under its own bloat. It shouldn't be long until Mac and *NIX are the only things left in the desktop and server markets.

I can only hope that we, the end users, will be that lucky.

A friend of mine told me of his experience with Vista in another friends home. His explanation was that he felt like he was in a kindergarten class.

Talk about trying to 'dumb-down' society. No wonder nobody likes it.

Cheers

I think that "Winbloze," as you call it, is being hit hard by something that's turning out to be "a better way to do the software business." It's called synergy, where "the sum of the whole" of the cooperative contributions of thousands of developers is turning out to be much greater than "the sum of its parts." People have finally stopped re-inventing wheels.

MS has been plugging away at .. "what do you want to call it today?" .. for how-many years now? How-many billions of dollars?

And what has the competition been doing in the meantime? Well, basically, eating Microsoft's lunch!

How? With open source, and/or stuff that's based on it. And it's not all "free." But looky at what they're doing with it, and how quickly and cheaply they're doing it...

Apple decides that they don't like the PowerPC, so "poof!" they switch mid-stream to the X86 and don't miss a beat. They spent less money and time doing it than they had budgeted. Then they want to do a telephone: OS/X and Safari and so-forth are already there, waiting to be recompiled. That's what enables them to be nimble, and in a highly competitive business world, "nimble" means everything. It's like starting out on a "hundred-mile journey" ten miles away from your destination. Apple isn't sipping the Nectar of the Gods just because Steve Jobs looks good on stage in a black outfit.

There's this wee little compiler suite called gcc which runs on everything, compiles for everything else, supports a bunch of languages (FORTRAN, anyone?) and is free. The Swiss Army(R) Knife. The market for every other compiler on the planet disappeared.

Now, Microsoft makes some good stuff ... some damned good stuff ... and I think we have to acknowledge that. There are thousands of good engineers (and executives) up there who are extremely good at what they do. But their business-model is wrong. They need to rip down those fences and start swimming with the river instead of against it. It's a tough cultural change for a company to make, but you know, IBM did it.

Basically, when your competitors are out there doing things this way, and they're being so obviously successful at it, you have to follow suit. Mister Market does not give you any alternative.

But VisDuh is selling better than ever! Every time you buy a new PC it comes pre-infested, Bill makes a buck, and your shiny new *NIX machine counts as a VisDuh sale.

In your dreams. Windows is entrenched in the pc market and it is highly unlikely it will just "dissapear"