As Katz notes (in a rather disingenuous aside), there is a real gulf between the tech-heads who populate slashdot.org and have the nous to use an OS like linux, and the rest of the world (Yeah I use linux, but I also use Win98...) Why was the iMac such a success? Because it was a return to the attitude pioneered by Apple and stolen by MS, that most PC users don't want to know what goes on inside the box ("out of the box and onto the net in 10 minutes", if you'd like to recall the advertising). Same goes for Win9x... Who really wants to learn about dmas, irqs, scripts and all the rest to simply play games, engage in correspondence, etc etc? Most people don't... and linux has still a way to go before the average home PC user can move across. (Admittedly, it has made some giant leaps and bounds in the last year in this general direction). The odd thing is that the whole debate seems to conflate this part of the world (the home PC user) with the world of IT users where MS has never really been a competitor and possibly never will be. And one last comment... this won't deal a coup de grace: think only of MS's serious attempts to move beyond the world of PC's into consumer electronics - the real game may not be PC OS's, servers or anything of the like, but the very basic user interface on consumer items... WinCE.
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As Katz notes (in a rather disingenuous aside), there is a real gulf between the tech-heads who populate slashdot.org and have the nous to use an OS like linux, and the rest of the world (Yeah I use linux, but I also use Win98 ...) Why was the iMac such a success? Because it was a return to the attitude pioneered by Apple and stolen by MS, that most PC users don't want to know what goes on inside the box ("out of the box and onto the net in 10 minutes", if you'd like to recall the advertising). Same goes for Win9x ... Who really wants to learn about dmas, irqs, scripts and all the rest to simply play games, engage in correspondence, etc etc? Most people don't ... and linux has still a way to go before the average home PC user can move across. (Admittedly, it has made some giant leaps and bounds in the last year in this general direction). The odd thing is that the whole debate seems to conflate this part of the world (the home PC user) with the world of IT users where MS has never really been a competitor and possibly never will be. And one last comment ... this won't deal a coup de grace: think only of MS's serious attempts to move beyond the world of PC's into consumer electronics - the real game may not be PC OS's, servers or anything of the like, but the very basic user interface on consumer items ... WinCE.