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Rivals Upset At Windows XP Features
Beowu1f writes: "Found an AP story on yahoo with a few snippet comments from the Iowa Attorney General, AOL, RealNetworks, Norton and a law professor. The article is relatively plain, talking about how rivals are getting pissed at the snowballing of features into XP, .NET and Hailstorm, saying it's the same as what MS did with IE, etc. etc." The article quotes David Farber, too. I don't mind that most Linux distros come with CD-burning software, IRC clients, a great paint program, etc. -- but then, they're independently written and optional.
Tilt your head 90 degrees counter-clockwise for the Eric Cartman effect.
The difference is:
(1) Imagine that a single company made 96% of all the cars on the road.
(2) Imagine that company wanted to own the car stereo market, so they dumped loads of money into R&D and came up with a car stereo which was as good as all the aftermarket ones.
They advertise that they are putting this super car stereo in all their cars for free. This kills the third-party car stereo market. But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, so the cost is made up for increasing the price of parts for these cars.
If Microsoft shipped a simple, bare-bones, no-bells-and-whistles web browser with their operating system, and then marketed a super-gee-whiz version of their web browser separately, I wouldn't complain. After all, this is what they do with MS Write / MS Word!
Why isn't Microsoft bundling all the functionality of Microsoft Word into every copy of Windows?
There has actually been numerous lawsuits and fed investigations of the car stereo situation. So far, Detroit has gotten away with what they've been doing (for example, the oval-shaped stereo in Tauruses), but don't oversimplify the situation.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It's been known since the early 90s (to paraphrase/steal the words of the authors of "Undocumented DOS"): Your product may be a DLL in the next version of Windows. If you develop apps for Windows, don't act all shocked when it finally happens to you.
You gambled: take the risk that MS will eventually get around to backstabbing you, and in the mean time, enjoy having a fairly large market. When they finally come for you, don't bitch about it. Where the fuck were you when Microsoft was preloading Windows on everyone's PC and making per-CPU licensing deals? Where the fuck were you when users of the minority platforms cried out for more apps? You ignored them because their market was too small, and you reinforced Microsoft's dominance and legitimized Windows as a desktop product. So shut the fuck up and quit begging the government to protect you now that you've reaped what you've sown.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Meaningless masturbation. Why bother listing all of that? Do any of us really care? Does it somehow make you more knowledgeable about Microsoft or the Windows market?
Uhh ... no. Windows (NT and 2000 -- I'm not even considering Win9x here) can actually be considered more secure than Linux (assuming both machines are properly setup by knowledgeable administrators), as it's more difficult to run code remotely on an NT box. As for the virus problem, the only reason it exists is because Windows is vastly more popular than pretty much anything else. As we've seen in the past few months, even Linux can have "virii" (well, worms, but still ...).
By "system tools", what do you mean? Seems to me like all the Administrative Tools and the Control Panel would be considered "system tools". On top of that, you have standard stuff like ping, tracert, nslookup, and so on. And if you want stuff like perl, python, or bash to do some scripting (and you don't want to use the Windows Scripting Host), you can get them just fine. As for the installer situation, I guess you haven't heard about this nifty little thing called "Microsoft Installer". Released slighlty prior to Windows 2000, and available for 95, 98, NT4, and Me (shipped with Me), the Microsoft Installer gets rid of the whole Installshield dependency (though Installshield has built a tool to make it easier to generate an msi. You should don't have to use it). I won't even bother to mention how fragmented Linux's whole installer systems are.
I agree, to an extent. The low-level I/O functionality should be in the OS. however, that doesn't mean Adaptec can't go and make a nice gui on top of it. If these companies would get their heads our of their asses and start working rather than bitching, they'd see they're not so screwed as they think they are.
And you want to be able to buy all that for $99. Yeah, right. Remember, Microsoft's software is written by professionals, not volunteers writing in their free time. For them to continue to be able to produce software, they need to charge the proper amount for their products (and whether you like Microsoft or not, I think you'd agree that they should be allowed to continue writing software and let the market get rid of them if it will, rather than forcing them out by pricing caps). On top of that, I'd rather pay money for a quality office suite like Microsoft Office, rather than suffer with a free suite like Star Office.
And MY desktop says it isn't. Woah, anecdotal evidence! That's no better than the "Linux is more stable because I had my computer stay up for three years straight, once" argument. Linux may well be more stable, but that kind of anecdotal evidence means less than nothing.
Greg
The same thing can be applied to just about any platform, not just Windows. When the development of the product line has stepped a certain amount ahead of a certain release it becomes increasingly expensive to keep going back and fixing bugs in older versions.. especially when the bugs become even more benign and affect fewer consumers of the product.
Microsoft has a standard "n - 2" policy for supporting product lines, so when 2 more releases of the same product come out they will typically no longer fix bugs the that version. I think that's pretty fair since it means that Windows NT 3.51 is still in this category and was released many years ago.
I wouldn't expect any commercial software vendor to have to keep up with ~ 5 years of support when most bugs for a product are probably fixed in 2 - 3 years. Sure, more bugs always crop up - but that's why you need business justification to fix bugs.
I'm sure that if you went to the mainstream kernel team and complained about a bug in 2.2 that was fixed in a newer release, that they would not go porting it back. Ok so you can change the source yourself but this is not always possible and also not always viable (Linux is special here).
So consider these things when thinking about product cycles. It may not seem like it all the time, but there are valid business reasons behind moving support away from a product.
Believe it or not Microsoft has got to actually SELL copies of Windows XP. If Windows XP is chuck full of stupid "features" that are actually disincentives to the upgrade then people will stick with what they have.
No they won't. Microsoft puts major pressure on OEMs to ship the latest version of Windows. Prices on older versions are typically not cut, and sometimes pricing it set so that older versions actually cost more. 6 months after XP is introduced, it will be virtually impossible to buy a computer from a major OEM that doesn't have it pre-installed. Most people won't know enough to go somewhere else. And it won't even really be a viable option for those few who do; new hardware and software won't support the old OS after a while.
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As a loyal Mac user, it breaks my heart to say this, but Apple is worse when it comes to bundling. Let's take a look at the list of things Apple has bundled or currently bundled with their OS and computers:
QuickTime: A media player, bundled with all Macs and current MacOS versions.
iTunes: A MP3 player, ripper, and audio-CD burner program, bundled with new Macs and Mac OS X, I believe.
Disc Burner: A CD burner program, bundled with new Macs and Mac OS versions.
Cyberdog: Though now defunct, Apple used to bundle the Cyberdog browser with the OS as part of OpenDoc (a really cool idea that didn't quite make it, possibly killed by MS).
Mail: A decent email client bundled with OS X.
Apache, FTP daemon, etc, all the usual Unix stuff: bundled with Mac OS X.
AppleWorks: a multi-purpose application package, sort of a poor-man's Offfice with a database thrown in. Bundled with new iMacs.
Then there's third-party software like Quicken, which is often bundled with iMacs, and, of course, both Netscape and IE are bundled with the Mac OS (I think IE is the default install).
All in all, Apple seems to bundle more stuff than Microsoft does. My conclusion is that we complain about MS because they're the market leader, not because of their actions, and I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do...
If you were thinking about piriting WinZip, I might suggest rather that you look into PowerArchiver. Very nice. Free (beer).
www.powerarchiver.com
I'm curious.. What process is that exactly? I'm curious cause you can check every single process that is running, which DLL's it has loaded etc. and while I see a lot of other stuff like csrss, I sure as hell don't see anything related to IE.
I also don't understand why the hell anyone would like to remove the best web browser on earth from their installation. Maybe it's just me but it bothers me when people spend a large portion of their day hating Microsoft and Bill Gates. Define yourself by what you are FOR, not by what you are AGAINST.
Excellent point.
I suppose that operating systems are a tough business to be in anyway... that is, suppose a lot of the reasons why Windows is an "entrenched" OS (application support, hardware support, brand name recognition, ease-of-use, existing user base, etc.) were nullified by Monday morning at 10am. I seriously doubt that Linux, BeOS, and OS/2 would fill in all the gaps and/or do a better job for most users anytime within the next 2 years. But even more important, I seriously doubt that someone on Monday morning, deciding to seize the opportunity, could make an OS from scratch within the next two years that could compete among the remaining OSes. Considering that a very large user base, several times the size of the MS Windows core development team, has spent the better part of a decade building a better OS from scratch in an open and collaborative process, yet only 5% of the market uses it and most admit that it's not ready for most of the 85% majority OS users, that says something about the sheer difficulty of living up to the expectations set by Windows.
Before anyone adds that MS is anticompetitive and THAT'S why they're entrenched... well, Linux is free, it's been around awhile, and the business world knows about it. With all respect to the concept that people don't like change... I think the expense of Windows licenses would be enough motivation for the majority of the business world and computer manufacturers to jump ship by now. But Windows apparently has enough advantages to keep a lot of people in its tent.
The fact is, Windows, Linux, and now even OS X, constantly set a very high bar for what's expected in an operating system. OS X took YEARS to come around, and GNU/Linux is a very complex system for providing a very complete library of tools and applications that can be bundled as a package (and unbundled, as well). I marvel at innovation that's so speedy and prolific like this.
Microsoft plays unfair? Probably. But in this "business", I doubt that fair could ever win anymore. I think that at some point we have to settle for "unfair" but "pretty damn good". Just like with Intel... they might have a questionable lock on their market (well, AMD has been creeping in on them for a number of years and they're permanently in the game now), but can you really look down on a company that has kept up with Moore's Law for over two decades? If we had 10 processor vendors competing harshly today to sell 33mhz processors, would that be better for the consumer?
No, they complained , among other things, that MS tied it to the OS and refused to allow OEMs to add Netscape to the desktop. Not only did MS ensure that every new purchaser of Windows had a copy of IE, they also guarenteed that the purchaser would not have a copy of Netscape no matter what inticements Netscape offered the OEMs.
But that is exactly the way the Netscape pushed Spyglass out of the same market.
I agree that Netscape was trying to do the same thing MS was: use their domination of the browser market as leverage to gain greater market share in the server market.
However, Netscape was on an equal footing with Spyglass in that they could only offer inducements to OEMs and ISPs to distribute their browser, trial programs, etc. MS had one advantage none of the other sellers of browsers had: the OS. The could (and did) use their control of the desktop to make sure every user had a copy of their software which could not be deleted and that none of their competitor's browsers would show up on the desktop "out of the box".
I feel like picking a fight with everyone who thinks they are right. - Rainmakers
Actually Real Networks is a terrible company - their software is so full of marketing and commercial shit you have to click on a good hundred of checkboxes to NOT get spam and constant sollicitation.
Right. suck said it best. Practices that commonly happen (all comps come preloaded with MS OS) are not questioned, and are impossible to get around in most places.
There are only two or there places where I can get a laptop not bundled with the MS tax.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
[Here's my submission of the story that got rejected for some reason]
Ah, Spring! It brings birds, neighbors mowing their laws, and the newly-awaken actions from everyone's favorite monopoly!
That's right, Microsoft's at it again. This time, it's Windows XP, and Microsoft's idea to bundle tons of new stuff into it. The associated press reports that Microsoft is bundling plenty of stuff to keep the Department of Justice busy: MSN Instant Messenger now loads automatically every time you boot Windows XP. A firewall and DVD player are included as well. Of course the firewall will work as advertised, and will never work only to block messages to rivals' network connections while leaving Microsoft open to send anything they want back to Microsoft's servers. Microsoft has never done that, and it's horrible of you to think they would! Look, that issue with the greeting card company in 1999 was just a misunderstanding, not policy.
Microsoft is just trying to give the consumers what they want. As a Microsoft spokes person said, "If people don't find those features compelling enough to upgrade they can keep whatever the heck they want. They're not forced to upgrade."
Funny they should say that.
Microsoft's new upgrade policy basically says that if large companies to upgrade to Windows XP and Office XP by October 2001, they won't be eligible for upgrade pricing after that. ZD Net reports that Microsoft is raising fees from anywhere from 33 to 107%. Guernsey Research analyst Chris LeToq summarized these actions saying that Microsoft is forcing an upgrade.
Clearly Microsoft is no longer concerned about any actions from the DOJ. Lest we forget, according to an article from the Mercury Center in 1999 (sorry, no URL available), they hedged their bets by buying off the presidential candidates early ($18k for John McCain, and they helped finance Bush's gubernatorial inauguration). According to the New York Times, Microsoft hired Ralph Reed, one of Bush's top consultants, to help them during the DOJ trial.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
I don't see how anyone could compare Microsoft, who has a monopoly, with Apple who has 10% of the desktop market, or less. If Apple ever gets 90% of the desktop market (or even 50%), then people will question their bundling issues as hard as Microsoft's.
Repeat after me: Companies with monopolies are treated differently than those without monopolies.
Plus, Apple's bundlings are more for giving a newbie user a simple capability. For example, Disk Burner provides basic disc burning capabilities, but a user will quickly outgrow it's capability and go with Toast when they want to do xBook capabilities or multiple sessions. Or iTunes has basic MP3 jukebox capabilities, but advanced users quickly move to the more feature-full options. One could argue that Apple is helping third-party companies by giving users a simple application that shows them the need for the more feature-rich application for sale by a third party. Witness the success of Cassidy & Green's Conflict Catcher or Norton Disk Doctor even though Apple has bundled Extension Manager and Disk First Aid for years.
Microsoft, on the other hand is building applications to compete with their vendors. Microsoft Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Outlook, etc has the most features of any application in their class. I'm not saying they're better, but I'm saying that Microsoft happily competes with its "partners" in a way far different than Apple.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Actually, a lot of those stereos are built by the big-name brands - Sony, Blaupunkt etc - and then rebadged by the car manufacturer. That's why the manufacturers don't complain: they're the ones benefitting!
Yeah. Just like getting long-distance service bundled with your local phone service was a really good thing, and we all love getting Windows bundled with our PCs - oh. Wait. We don't. That's why it's illegal...
The whole point of the anti-trust legislation is that when you have a monopoly in one market (local phone service, OS sales) you aren't allowed to use that monopoly to boost market share in another market (long distance, applications) - that's illegal abuse of monopoly power, which is what AT&T were cut up for, and what MS will hopefully be cut up for...
Maybe this is the future of third-party software - stuff that removes preloaded Microsoft crap, just to free up resources for real work.
Ok, lets take a look at Windows. People don't want HTML rendering engines and stuff built in. Fine, so you take out high-level network stuff. What about low-level? Remember the days of Trumpet Winsock, and how you needed third party software to even get onto the Internet? Ok, so we take that out, because it's unfair bundling. What about device drivers? Remember the old days in DOS when you'd install a game, and you'd pick your soundcard and video card from a list? Gravis Ultrasound Max, Sound Blaster Pro or compatible, ATI, S3, Trident, all that? What about windowing environments? In the PC world, they started out as third party addons for DOS; Desqview and the like. So out they go. What about memory management? Quarterdeck got pretty pissed when EMM386 got bundled in with DOS. Hell, what about filesystems? Do you honestly think Sun's incapable of making a filesystem worth having? Of course not. But Veritas would get pretty pissed. Operating systems are including more and more stuff as time goes on, and I, for one, think it's a good thing. I like the fact that I don't have to tweak TSRs and IRQs in Windows the way I had to in DOS. I like the idea of buying a network card and having it work with the OS, and not needing to get a third party TCP/IP stack. I like the idea of software being able to say 'Requires DirectX 7' and that being the end of it.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
MS stops bundling all these apps with the operating system and instead makes them available as free downloads.
Is anyone here in favor of banning freely downloadable software?
KFG
Personally, I think the next MS case should be over the fact that they no longer support versions of their software; if it could be legally proven that one version of windows (let's say Win95) performed the same tasks as another version (i.e. WinME), but was no longer supported by the company, then they should have to purchase those licenses back (imho). Now *that* would make them suffer.
Good point. However, the issue in this case is that Microsoft made it very difficult if not impossible to remove that car stereo and implement a different brand stereo.
If Ford, for example, made it impossible to remove the stereos from the car, you would agree that aftermarket stereo manufacturers would in fact not survive.
There's nothing wrong with features. We must look at the definition of 'illegal monopoly.' I would say that when Microsoft "bundles" items and then makes it that difficult to change them or even install an additional copy of a similar program, you've got problems.
I am supposing, however, that with the Republican administration, none of this matters too much. Or is that a misconception? I don't Bush would ever split up MS, but then again it's not just Bush doing the splitting.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Somehow, getting more for your money is bad for the consumer.
Guess what? Many cars come "bundled" with car stereos. You can't get the car for less money if you don't want the stereo. Guess what else? That stereo was probably built by the car manufacturer under a different name.
Yet, somehow aftermarket car stereo manufacturers manage to survive. I don't here them whining about "monopolistic" policies of the car manufacturers, even that clearly costs them huge amounts of market.
Deal with it. Getting more applications for your money instead of less is a good thing.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
IE's success has little to do with the bundling. It's just that it had parity with Netscape at the 3.0 version, and 4.0 (three years ago) completely blew Netscape out of the water. The same will be applicable for all of these other programs.
The people at Real should look at their own product before they go claiming that Windows Media Player is "not the best product". WMP7 is starting to cross the line, but it's still far far removed from the crapware that is RealPlayer or QuickTime. I'd use Winamp, but it doesn't play videos.
I don't care much for MSN Messenger, but it has been my IM for a while, so I may as well use that.
I'm not going to use the Windows DVD player -- I went through all of that before. A regular player that I can run on my larger TV with a remote control is much nicer.
As far as firewalls go... well, it's a security product written by Microsoft. It might be good for warding off tigers and polar bears.
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
I work for a smallish startup (1000 people) that actually produces product, so has been fairly resilient to the recent adjustment of valuations. We got a version of win2k around December of last year, and after a week of poking at it, deceided that the benefits from the installs would negate the downtime of migrating users over. The roll over was pretty painless.
Now we recieved a beta version of winXP in the office a few weeks back, and let me just say that we will not be upgrading to it. Basically it doesn't add anything new. Sure, theres a few little cool features, but honestly it's not worth the effort.
Do I think it's wrong to bundle Windows Media Player with the os? no, not really. Do I think it's wrong to bundle a anti-virus program with winxp? Hell, nobody complained with msav in dos.
Personnally I think Microsoft could do some good/interesting things by instead of licensing the OS to manufacturers and/or users licensing it to distributors who then value add things and resell the OS as their own distribution.
Someone could then actually sell a version of windows with litestep out of the box, or with an installer that lets you choose IE or Netscape or kmeleon or opera or...
Wouldn't that be interesting
I just killed a field mouse for 120 XP, how much do I get if I kill this Windows thing?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Should Windows force you to install a streaming media system so you can view MPEG-4 movies streamed in an encrypted format from Microsoft NT Server systems, just because you want to put a file on a CD, or an MP3, or whatever? F--- no. What the hell does one have to do with the other? Even assuming that there are going to be places where the two can interoperate, CD burning requires nothing more than a handful of codecs.
Which is fine. I respect your choice of alternative operating system, and I even respect your desire to have IE, Outlook Express, MSN Messenger, and Windows Media Services all installed on your hard disk and, for the most part, all in memory when you're using your machine.But there's no reason why someone else should subsidise your desire to do this. And there's no reason why competitors should find their products perform poorly and roadblocks are installed simply because the product that the average business needs, if it wishes to remain in business, and employees generally need at home if they want their skills to stay in sync, and which everyone else gets because of the first two and the fact that Microsoft forces companies that offer customers a choice of OSes to pay more per unit than those that force everyone to buy Windows, comes with a whole set of apps unrelated to "being an operating system" preinstalled and loaded into memory.
That's messed up.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
they should have every right to bundle what they want in their operating system. How is that protecting consumers means forcing them to buy more software? How is this preventing users from buying more software if they want to? How is that when features are added to linux distributions its not the same thing? Why? Is it because Linux is free? Why? Is because you can choose to install someone elses version (Guess what, I installed someone elses defragger on my windows - nothing prevent me)
:)
If anything the widespread use of PCs has been because we had someone who made it easy on the "BELOW average person". Thats the key to this whole issue, the majority of consumers want to plug it in and go. They don't want to have to download a web browser, an email program, or even a word processor.
Wordpad has been in windows forever, and do people complain about it? It does 90% of what most people could ever want! Should windows be without tcp/ip support? After all the story goes that some poor third party company is obviously being prevented from thriving because TCP/IP is in the operating system.
What utter bullshit. They can include any software they want in their operating system. It does not prevent me from using WHAT I WANT to use.
So who decides what is acceptable for them to bundle in their operating system??? WHO? You want the government to do it?
Lets see... pick what can and cannot be in an operating system (optional install or not - they put it on the CD)
1. sound card support
2. video driver support
3. cd rom support
4. dvd player support
5. avi support
6. mp3 support
7. mouse support
8. basic networking
9. TCP/IP
10. DIAL UP
11. DSL/Cable support?
12. Word processing (ie word pad)
13. Word processing (ie something like WORD)
14. Database support (I would love at least a standard one, something I can use without having to buy ACCESS)
15. Browser (internet/intranet)
16. Email program
17. FTP program (via a browser interface)
18. Game support via specialty drivers
19. Disk utilities
20. Advanced disk utilities
21. PC Security services
22. encryption
23. Software to customize the operating system
24. auto matic update process
25. uninstall programs
26. support for the disabled (try and remove it - they couldn't even if they wanted to... thats what happens when governments decide what you must have and must not have!!!!!)
27. pretty backgrounds
28. themes
29. cd burning software
30. file management software(explorer - command line should be all they need eh?)
Come on, pick. I bet you can't get an agreement on all of them, hell 90% would be tough. So what to do? Tell them none of it? Would you buy an operating system that could not do half of whats listed? How about only one fourth???
The point is, you do have a choice in operating systems. You can run linux or windows on your PC. You can even step back and run dos or desqview. You can even run OS/2. So if its such a heartache then why don't do it? Hell, its only apple that forces people to run their stuff, they run competitors on their hardware and software platforms out of business... but I guess thats okay, because only 5% suffer from it
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Netscape whined about Microsoft pushing them out of the browser business by giving away free software. But that is exactly the way the Netscape pushed Spyglass out of the same market. Netscape claimed to be charging for the browser but gave away as many copies as they could to seed the market.
Complaints about dotnet and hailstorm have to be considered in the same light. Sun made an attempt to gain a stranglehold over the development of computing languages. Java is the only 'standard' I know of where one manufacturer has a veto over the languages development.
All in all it reminds me of the Republicans complaints about Clinton's bribe taking while all the time taking even bigger bribes themselves from the tobacco lobby, etc. etc. etc etc.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
"I don't know of any businesses that have rolled out Windows XP"
No kidding? Isn't it surprising that no businesses have rolled out a product that's not scheduled to release until 5 months from now?
"nor do I know of any that have done a serious desktop rollout of Windows 2000, for that matter"
So what am I doing working on a project to roll out Win2K to over 30,000 users? Many other companies are doing the same thing. They're mostly all still in the planning stages though, since it's a very big job to convert your whole infrastructure.
Don't get me wrong, I think Microsoft are pure evil too. However, there's no reason to resort to misinformation.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Believe it or not Microsoft has got to actually SELL copies of Windows XP. If Windows XP is chuck full of stupid "features" that are actually disincentives to the upgrade then people will stick with what they have. This is nearly as dangerous for Microsoft as if the user had switched to Linux. Remember, Microsoft's biggest competitor isn't Corel, or Oracle, or IBM, or even the amorphous "Linux," Micrsoft's biggest competitor is previous versions of their own software.
Even worse issues like games and compatibility with work also make it more likely that people will stick with what they have. I don't know of any businesses that have rolled out Windows XP (nor do I know of any that have done a serious desktop rollout of Windows 2000, for that matter). They should be making their operating system as attractive to buyers as they possibly can. Instead they are lining up an initiative to treat their customers as copyright breaking thieves. Things like WMA and the new copy protection scheme aren't likely to entire current Windows users to this new OS.
Meanwhile Linux will continue to grow. naysayers have been predicting its imminent demise since it's first arrival on the scene, and they have always been spectacularly wrong. The reason for this is simple, Linux is too darned useful. It's price tag is a siren song for hackers and entrepreneurs everywhere, and the cost of maintaining the infrastructure that keeps Linux alive is negligible. Microsoft can't bankrupt Linux, it can't buy Linux, and it can't intimidate enough Linuxers to make a difference.
This doesn't make Linux better than Windows. I personally don't think that Linux is ready for the desktop, for example. But it does guarantee that Linux will keep growing, and that it will continue to become a more viable alternative every day. If Microsoft continues to misuse their customers they will someday find that most of them are jumping ship.