So what if working in a basement sucks? Working in a warehouse can't be any better, yet there's lots of people willingly working at Amazon's warehouses. And I'm sure those aren't geodesic.
Again, this is a data center. Data centers don't need a lot of employees, probably far fewer than an Amazon warehouse. Once the systems are all set up, there's not much to do, as they can all be accessed remotely. The only time people need to be on-site is to perform any regular maintenance (cleaning dust out maybe?), or to replace failed components.
There is, but very very few people know about them. Unity and Gnome3 have all the attention, and are the standard on the most popular distros (Ubuntu and Fedora), so when some newbie wants to check out Linux to see if it's a viable alternative to Windows, that's what they're going to see and try. And they probably won't like it (just like they don't like Win8/Metro, which is why they're looking for an alternative), so they'll dismiss Linux as stupid and having a crappy UI, even worse than Win8. It doesn't matter if KDE would be a very easy transition for Windows refugees, since it works a lot like XP/Vista/7's UI, because potential converts are never going to see KDE, because no distros use it as the primary DE (except for openSuSE, and no one uses that anyway). So Linux on the desktop is condemned to irrelevance because of Unity and Gnome3, and the Linux proponents keep wondering why we can't get more people to convert. Of all places, corporate desktops would really be the best place for a Linux takeover, but here one of the main players is Red Hat, and they're giant Gnome backers, so again that'll never happen, because no company is going to adopt Gnome3 as their DE, since they'd have to retrain everyone so much (e.g. "here's the secret keypress you have to remember to power down your computer at the end of the day") and having a huge IT helpdesk department to answer the constant barrage of questions about its weird behavior.
We're talking about a data center here, not a house. Who cares if living in a basement is dismal? There usually aren't that many employees working at data centers, and and underground data center can't be any more dismal than working at a warehouse.
The issue with Microsoft is that they went about this wrong. They forced significant changes upon users where changes were not really warranted.
Yes, actually they were warranted: Microsoft needs people to get used to Metro and learn to like it, so they'll want to buy phones and tablets with Metro too (Windows Phones and Surface tablets). WinPhones aren't doing well in the market, so people need to be pushed into buying them somehow.
This is particularly a big issue in companies where users are accustomed to working on the same style of desktop etc. These are people that complain when an icon is moved on their desktop or get confused with minor changes to applications so a full UI overhaul in the corporate space was truly a bad idea and one which will cost Microsoft dearly in the years ahead.
With people being forced to use Metro on their work PCs, they'll get used to it and like it, and want it on their phones and tablets too. Since corporations absolutely refuse to abandon Microsoft OSes for their workers' PCs, Microsoft can leverage their near-monopoly here. Of course, some companies will hold out with Win7 for a while, but that can only last so long. What are these companies going to do anyway, switch to Mac or Linux? Despite a lot of huffing and puffing, they haven't done it yet in any significant numbers.
Giving options to use their new interface components is a better approach
No it's not, because then people will just turn Metro off and never look at it again, instead of being forced to get accustomed to it.
(one which Apple has taken with their desktop OS
People don't need to be pushed and manipulated to buy Apple stuff like they do Microsoft stuff, so Apple doesn't have to resort to measures like these.
All they need to do is give people an option to turn the metro shit off.
No, they don't. If they let people turn the Metro shit off, then people won't get used to using Metro and learn to like it. Then they won't want to buy Windows phones and tablets which also have Metro on them. People need to have Metro forced on them on their PCs and laptops so they'll want to buy phones and tablets too.
Wow, well that would really explain it. If people being in certain positions only depends on who you know or are related to, rather than skills and education, then who knows what kind of idiot you're going to encounter in any particular job. Also, your comment about Peru sounds like some things I'd heard about other Latin American countries (that it's not easy getting into certain positions because of the educational requirements), and it's really interesting and odd that Mexico isn't like that.
Look at HP and Dell (or the companies they merged with) as an example of why IBM is a model for every company trying to divest from a core but dying business.
What's wrong with Dell? And why would they want to get away from selling PCs and laptops? It may not be quite as profitable as in the past when companies were upgrading every 2-3 years, but people still need laptops, servers, and desktop PCs, especially in the corporate sector, and frankly, I don't know what decent competition Dell has besides Lenovo (there's also HP, but I said "decent"), and maybe Samsung. HP may want to get away from this business, but not because it's "dying", but rather because they're so incompetent and have produced junk for so long that no one wants to buy from them any more.
Perhaps so; the Mexicans I had to deal with in a professional capacity were buying/purchasing people, not IT people or anything like that. If all the purchasing agents are this incompetent, I don't know how Mexican companies manage to get anything purchased. Also interesting was that, at least for this one (very large foreign-owned) company, they couldn't have goods shipped directly to them in Mexico City, they had to be shipped to a third-party company in Texas which then shipped to them. Is shipping in Mexico that problematic that you can't just send stuff by Fedex or UPS down there? There's never any weird problems like this when dealing with Canadians.
I think MS has a few more "tricks" than just Windows and Office, namely Windows Server, Sharepoint, Exchange/Outlook, and maybe SQL Server. There's also Xbox. Yes, they're all tied to Windows and Office, but they're still all profitable from what I've heard. Exchange/Outlook in particular has been a must-have in many, many companies, as much as I hate to admit it.
That's fine, but how many people out there actually use PSD files in their work? I'm guessing most office workers out there, and most home users, do not ever get PSD files sent to them, and if they did, they wouldn't know what to do with them. They can use Word and that's about it, perhaps a little Excel and Powerpoint for some of them.
People keep making Photoshop out to be some kind of killer application that nearly everyone with a computer needs to use, but I don't see it. Not everyone is a photographer or graphics artist.
Yes, Linux is free in that situation: the product itself is free, but you have to pay for support.
To make an annoying car analogy, it's like a car that a company gives away for free, but which you have the option to pay for a support and maintenance contract. If anything goes wrong with the car, you call them up and they fix it, tow it, give you a loaner, etc. However, if you don't want to spend any money, you can take the free car and fix it yourself, though you may need to spend money on parts. Which you choose depends on your needs, abilities, and finances.
Who do you think approved Win8, and who pushed for the dumb strategy of trying to unify the UI across all devices? It was the guy at the top.
And as the other poster said, Win8 was a boon for Apple, not Linux. Linux shot itself in the foot by adopting the same idiotic unified-UI strategy with Unity and Gnome3. The KDE folks had the right idea, wanting to have different UIs for different devices (but running the KDE libs underneath them all; kde-desktop for the desktops and laptops, kde-netbook for netbooks, and kde-active for phones and tablets), however almost no one in Linux-land wants anything to do with KDE for some reason, and instead they prefer to keep using Gnome, while simultaneously bitching about the Gnome devs and their arrogance and removal of features.
Smart people usually don't want to live in some backwater like Indiana, or worse Detroit Michigan (who the hell wants to live in Detroit?). Putting money into setting up offices in such places isn't going to work, because you're not going to attract enough talent to make it worthwhile. You might get some people willing to move if you offer relo bonuses, but not that many. Tech companies like to locate in existing tech hubs because then they can just poach employees from the other companies in the area; they don't have to pay relo costs, and the employees don't have to sell their houses and uproot their families.
Don't forget, in this economy, for many employees you'll need to not only give them a relo bonus, you'll also need to buy their house from them, since houses aren't selling too well at the moment, and they can't afford to move if their house doesn't sell. If you don't, they won't take your offer: offering them less money than their current salary isn't going to pay for them to keep and rent out their current house and rent or buy a new house in the new city; it's easier for them to just stay in their current location and get a new job there (or just stay at their current job).
The only way trying to start up in a new, non-"trendy" city works is when you locate in a college town and hire a bunch of fresh grads from the local university. Of course, this doesn't give you any experienced workers, so you have to already have some of those, or be able to import some to get things started.
Except that in the US, we have the AMA and licensing boards keeping foreign-educated surgeons out of the market (unless they can pass our licensing standards etc.; I imagine there's also arbitrary limits to how many licenses they'll grant at a time, to keep the competion down). So there might be plenty of low-price surgeons out there, but you'll have to leave the country to utilize them.
Simple: because that's where most of the qualified workers are. Yes, there's some qualified workers in fly-over cities, but not at nearly the density or number of the west coast cities (not even at the density of places like SLC, Phoenix, Colorado Springs, Austin, etc.). Worse, a lot of tech workers simply don't have any interest in living in the ultra-conservative heartland cities like Omaha. Even if you paid relocation for them, you wouldn't find that many takers.
Mexico, for that matter, is worse than that (mainly due to laziness; they're smart but hellishly lazy).
Really? That goes against everything I've seen about Mexicans. (warning: multiculturalists may be offended here...)
From what I've seen of Mexicans, both the ones I've hired for various labor jobs in the southwest, and from business dealings with some Mexican companies, they're very hard workers, willing to endure terrible heat to work outdoor jobs with few breaks. However, they're not very intelligent people, and their culture seems to be infused with chaos; they can't do anything complicated without it turning into a giant debacle. I sold some parts from my small company to a Mexican company, and a simple transaction for a few dozen parts, which should have taken no more than 5 emails or so, turned into a week-long debacle with 100+ emails going back and forth. I've never seen anything like this, with similar orders going to customers in countries like Canada and Denmark. Other dealings with Mexican companies have been similar: lots and lots of emails with few results to show for them.
IBM is one of the rare companies who reinvented themselves and eventually thrived again. It rarely happens such that it's a marvel and probably the best real-world lesson for any tech company trying to do the same.
Yep, it's extremely rare. Most companies, once things change too much for them or they screw up one too many times, are simply doomed, though with many their inertia may be so great it takes a long time for them to finally kick the bucket. Look at Borders books and Circuit City for example. AOL is another one, though they're an example of huge inertia, and they're still around, just in a zombified form and a tiny fraction of their former size.
Personally, I'd rather see MS become the next Circuit City, not the next IBM.
Once the PC market became a commodity they moved on.
No, not exactly. IBM flailed around in the commodity PC market for quite some time before finally exiting. Remember the PS/2 and PS/1? (What ever happened to the PS/0 anyway?) They tried for a long time to push massively overpriced junk in a market full of inexpensive "clones", even attempting to take over the market with proprietary junk like the MCA bus interface, thinking somehow that everyone would give up on the clones and run back to IBM and their high prices. Eventually, they moved their manufacturing to Lenovo in China, but still kept selling PCs and laptops with their name on them, well into the 2000s, until they sold that division to Lenovo (who got to keep using the IBM name for 5 years afterwards as part of the deal). For a very long time, they were the gold standard for business laptops with their Thinkpad line though their PCs weren't anything special after they finally gave up on the PS/2-type strategies and made industry-standard PCs like everyone else.
So no, they didn't "move on" when the PC market became a commodity; it took them a very long time to wake up and smell the coffee, and even then it took them a while before they finally sold off that business unit.
Do that many people really use Photoshop? For what little image editing I do, GIMP works fine; usually, the only things I ever do are crop and resize. I just don't have any reason to mess around with colors and such, let alone doing crazy stuff like putting objects on different backgrounds and the like. Resizing (like to make images 1/4 size so I can upload them at places where the full-size image is too big) is frequently done easily just with an Imagemagick script.
Are enough people really doing advanced Photoshop editing to hold back Linux adoption?
Yep, and look what an astounding success the ADAM was in the market.
The ADAM didn't have the smartest engineering design, either: the power supply was in the printer, so you couldn't run the computer without the printer being attached.
The other factor with hardware back in the 9x/ME days (and some during XP) was that most of the stability problems were caused by the hardware drivers: they were written by the hardware companies and were frequently of poor quality. Because of this, MS instituted the "WHQL" program to try to enforce driver quality.
Linux doesn't really have this problem because the drivers are all open-source, included in the kernel (and vetted and maintained by the kernel devs), and are generic to all hardware. What I mean by the latter is, if there was a class of device, such as a USB flash card reader, there'd be a handful of chips made by ASIC companies which would be used in these readers, but there'd be tons of hardware makers who would buy these small number of chips, design PCBs using the reference designs published by the ASIC companies, and sell their cheaply-made hardware on the market. There'd be many dozens of available readers, but internally they were all essentially identical. However, for Windows, each one of these little fly-by-night hardware companies would write their own device driver for the device, and include that on a disc or for download, and that's what you'd have to use to make the device work in Windows. Some would work fine, others would be buggy and make Windows crash. It didn't matter that the hardware was all the same. But in Linux, there'd only be one driver for all the devices based on a particular ASIC, and it'd be written usually by some programmer who wanted to get it to work in Linux; it'd be submitted for inclusion in the kernel, go through some rounds of code review, and finally be included, and maintained for perpetuity. As soon as that one driver was included, suddenly all the devices, by all the mfgrs, based on that one ASIC would work in Linux, and with only one driver, the likelihood of bugs would be far less.
Maybe at a few companies (companies are all different, after all, just like people), but not at many, if you look at the adoption figures for Win8. Also, companies usually treat IT as a cost center, and because of that, they frequently try to cut its budget to the bone because it doesn't actually generate any profit for the company (though its operations are essential for the operation of the business and making money). So if the IT manager tells the CEO that he wants a bunch of money for the latest MS upgrade, when they just spent a fortune upgrading to Win7 a couple years ago, that's probably not going to be well received. Heck, one of those hack-n-slash CEOs will see that as an opportunity to cut the IT budget, sack the IT director, have this shown to be a giant cost savings and improvement to the company's bottom line, and justify a big bonus for himself.
My wife used to be much more religious and went to "non-denominational" Christian churches years ago. She tells me about how they constantly preached that "unequally yoked" crap, yet in the church there'd be rather few single people, and a 10-to-1 (or worse) ratio of single women to single men. On top of that, while the girls would usually be fairly cute (according to her), the one or two men would be creeps with handlebar mustaches and the like.
Yes, but the overall company strategy depends on the CEO, and Win8 and Metro are big parts of a big new strategy for them. They aren't just some thing that Ballmer took 5 minutes to look at and say yes to.
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So what if working in a basement sucks? Working in a warehouse can't be any better, yet there's lots of people willingly working at Amazon's warehouses. And I'm sure those aren't geodesic.
Again, this is a data center. Data centers don't need a lot of employees, probably far fewer than an Amazon warehouse. Once the systems are all set up, there's not much to do, as they can all be accessed remotely. The only time people need to be on-site is to perform any regular maintenance (cleaning dust out maybe?), or to replace failed components.
There is, but very very few people know about them. Unity and Gnome3 have all the attention, and are the standard on the most popular distros (Ubuntu and Fedora), so when some newbie wants to check out Linux to see if it's a viable alternative to Windows, that's what they're going to see and try. And they probably won't like it (just like they don't like Win8/Metro, which is why they're looking for an alternative), so they'll dismiss Linux as stupid and having a crappy UI, even worse than Win8. It doesn't matter if KDE would be a very easy transition for Windows refugees, since it works a lot like XP/Vista/7's UI, because potential converts are never going to see KDE, because no distros use it as the primary DE (except for openSuSE, and no one uses that anyway). So Linux on the desktop is condemned to irrelevance because of Unity and Gnome3, and the Linux proponents keep wondering why we can't get more people to convert. Of all places, corporate desktops would really be the best place for a Linux takeover, but here one of the main players is Red Hat, and they're giant Gnome backers, so again that'll never happen, because no company is going to adopt Gnome3 as their DE, since they'd have to retrain everyone so much (e.g. "here's the secret keypress you have to remember to power down your computer at the end of the day") and having a huge IT helpdesk department to answer the constant barrage of questions about its weird behavior.
We're talking about a data center here, not a house. Who cares if living in a basement is dismal? There usually aren't that many employees working at data centers, and and underground data center can't be any more dismal than working at a warehouse.
The issue with Microsoft is that they went about this wrong. They forced significant changes upon users where changes were not really warranted.
Yes, actually they were warranted: Microsoft needs people to get used to Metro and learn to like it, so they'll want to buy phones and tablets with Metro too (Windows Phones and Surface tablets). WinPhones aren't doing well in the market, so people need to be pushed into buying them somehow.
This is particularly a big issue in companies where users are accustomed to working on the same style of desktop etc. These are people that complain when an icon is moved on their desktop or get confused with minor changes to applications so a full UI overhaul in the corporate space was truly a bad idea and one which will cost Microsoft dearly in the years ahead.
With people being forced to use Metro on their work PCs, they'll get used to it and like it, and want it on their phones and tablets too. Since corporations absolutely refuse to abandon Microsoft OSes for their workers' PCs, Microsoft can leverage their near-monopoly here. Of course, some companies will hold out with Win7 for a while, but that can only last so long. What are these companies going to do anyway, switch to Mac or Linux? Despite a lot of huffing and puffing, they haven't done it yet in any significant numbers.
Giving options to use their new interface components is a better approach
No it's not, because then people will just turn Metro off and never look at it again, instead of being forced to get accustomed to it.
(one which Apple has taken with their desktop OS
People don't need to be pushed and manipulated to buy Apple stuff like they do Microsoft stuff, so Apple doesn't have to resort to measures like these.
All they need to do is give people an option to turn the metro shit off.
No, they don't. If they let people turn the Metro shit off, then people won't get used to using Metro and learn to like it. Then they won't want to buy Windows phones and tablets which also have Metro on them. People need to have Metro forced on them on their PCs and laptops so they'll want to buy phones and tablets too.
Wow, well that would really explain it. If people being in certain positions only depends on who you know or are related to, rather than skills and education, then who knows what kind of idiot you're going to encounter in any particular job. Also, your comment about Peru sounds like some things I'd heard about other Latin American countries (that it's not easy getting into certain positions because of the educational requirements), and it's really interesting and odd that Mexico isn't like that.
Look at HP and Dell (or the companies they merged with) as an example of why IBM is a model for every company trying to divest from a core but dying business.
What's wrong with Dell? And why would they want to get away from selling PCs and laptops? It may not be quite as profitable as in the past when companies were upgrading every 2-3 years, but people still need laptops, servers, and desktop PCs, especially in the corporate sector, and frankly, I don't know what decent competition Dell has besides Lenovo (there's also HP, but I said "decent"), and maybe Samsung. HP may want to get away from this business, but not because it's "dying", but rather because they're so incompetent and have produced junk for so long that no one wants to buy from them any more.
Perhaps so; the Mexicans I had to deal with in a professional capacity were buying/purchasing people, not IT people or anything like that. If all the purchasing agents are this incompetent, I don't know how Mexican companies manage to get anything purchased. Also interesting was that, at least for this one (very large foreign-owned) company, they couldn't have goods shipped directly to them in Mexico City, they had to be shipped to a third-party company in Texas which then shipped to them. Is shipping in Mexico that problematic that you can't just send stuff by Fedex or UPS down there? There's never any weird problems like this when dealing with Canadians.
I think MS has a few more "tricks" than just Windows and Office, namely Windows Server, Sharepoint, Exchange/Outlook, and maybe SQL Server. There's also Xbox. Yes, they're all tied to Windows and Office, but they're still all profitable from what I've heard. Exchange/Outlook in particular has been a must-have in many, many companies, as much as I hate to admit it.
That's fine, but how many people out there actually use PSD files in their work? I'm guessing most office workers out there, and most home users, do not ever get PSD files sent to them, and if they did, they wouldn't know what to do with them. They can use Word and that's about it, perhaps a little Excel and Powerpoint for some of them.
People keep making Photoshop out to be some kind of killer application that nearly everyone with a computer needs to use, but I don't see it. Not everyone is a photographer or graphics artist.
Yes, Linux is free in that situation: the product itself is free, but you have to pay for support.
To make an annoying car analogy, it's like a car that a company gives away for free, but which you have the option to pay for a support and maintenance contract. If anything goes wrong with the car, you call them up and they fix it, tow it, give you a loaner, etc. However, if you don't want to spend any money, you can take the free car and fix it yourself, though you may need to spend money on parts. Which you choose depends on your needs, abilities, and finances.
Who do you think approved Win8, and who pushed for the dumb strategy of trying to unify the UI across all devices? It was the guy at the top.
And as the other poster said, Win8 was a boon for Apple, not Linux. Linux shot itself in the foot by adopting the same idiotic unified-UI strategy with Unity and Gnome3. The KDE folks had the right idea, wanting to have different UIs for different devices (but running the KDE libs underneath them all; kde-desktop for the desktops and laptops, kde-netbook for netbooks, and kde-active for phones and tablets), however almost no one in Linux-land wants anything to do with KDE for some reason, and instead they prefer to keep using Gnome, while simultaneously bitching about the Gnome devs and their arrogance and removal of features.
Smart people usually don't want to live in some backwater like Indiana, or worse Detroit Michigan (who the hell wants to live in Detroit?). Putting money into setting up offices in such places isn't going to work, because you're not going to attract enough talent to make it worthwhile. You might get some people willing to move if you offer relo bonuses, but not that many. Tech companies like to locate in existing tech hubs because then they can just poach employees from the other companies in the area; they don't have to pay relo costs, and the employees don't have to sell their houses and uproot their families.
Don't forget, in this economy, for many employees you'll need to not only give them a relo bonus, you'll also need to buy their house from them, since houses aren't selling too well at the moment, and they can't afford to move if their house doesn't sell. If you don't, they won't take your offer: offering them less money than their current salary isn't going to pay for them to keep and rent out their current house and rent or buy a new house in the new city; it's easier for them to just stay in their current location and get a new job there (or just stay at their current job).
The only way trying to start up in a new, non-"trendy" city works is when you locate in a college town and hire a bunch of fresh grads from the local university. Of course, this doesn't give you any experienced workers, so you have to already have some of those, or be able to import some to get things started.
Except that in the US, we have the AMA and licensing boards keeping foreign-educated surgeons out of the market (unless they can pass our licensing standards etc.; I imagine there's also arbitrary limits to how many licenses they'll grant at a time, to keep the competion down). So there might be plenty of low-price surgeons out there, but you'll have to leave the country to utilize them.
Simple: because that's where most of the qualified workers are. Yes, there's some qualified workers in fly-over cities, but not at nearly the density or number of the west coast cities (not even at the density of places like SLC, Phoenix, Colorado Springs, Austin, etc.). Worse, a lot of tech workers simply don't have any interest in living in the ultra-conservative heartland cities like Omaha. Even if you paid relocation for them, you wouldn't find that many takers.
Mexico, for that matter, is worse than that (mainly due to laziness; they're smart but hellishly lazy).
Really? That goes against everything I've seen about Mexicans. (warning: multiculturalists may be offended here...)
From what I've seen of Mexicans, both the ones I've hired for various labor jobs in the southwest, and from business dealings with some Mexican companies, they're very hard workers, willing to endure terrible heat to work outdoor jobs with few breaks. However, they're not very intelligent people, and their culture seems to be infused with chaos; they can't do anything complicated without it turning into a giant debacle. I sold some parts from my small company to a Mexican company, and a simple transaction for a few dozen parts, which should have taken no more than 5 emails or so, turned into a week-long debacle with 100+ emails going back and forth. I've never seen anything like this, with similar orders going to customers in countries like Canada and Denmark. Other dealings with Mexican companies have been similar: lots and lots of emails with few results to show for them.
IBM is one of the rare companies who reinvented themselves and eventually thrived again. It rarely happens such that it's a marvel and probably the best real-world lesson for any tech company trying to do the same.
Yep, it's extremely rare. Most companies, once things change too much for them or they screw up one too many times, are simply doomed, though with many their inertia may be so great it takes a long time for them to finally kick the bucket. Look at Borders books and Circuit City for example. AOL is another one, though they're an example of huge inertia, and they're still around, just in a zombified form and a tiny fraction of their former size.
Personally, I'd rather see MS become the next Circuit City, not the next IBM.
Once the PC market became a commodity they moved on.
No, not exactly. IBM flailed around in the commodity PC market for quite some time before finally exiting. Remember the PS/2 and PS/1? (What ever happened to the PS/0 anyway?) They tried for a long time to push massively overpriced junk in a market full of inexpensive "clones", even attempting to take over the market with proprietary junk like the MCA bus interface, thinking somehow that everyone would give up on the clones and run back to IBM and their high prices. Eventually, they moved their manufacturing to Lenovo in China, but still kept selling PCs and laptops with their name on them, well into the 2000s, until they sold that division to Lenovo (who got to keep using the IBM name for 5 years afterwards as part of the deal). For a very long time, they were the gold standard for business laptops with their Thinkpad line though their PCs weren't anything special after they finally gave up on the PS/2-type strategies and made industry-standard PCs like everyone else.
So no, they didn't "move on" when the PC market became a commodity; it took them a very long time to wake up and smell the coffee, and even then it took them a while before they finally sold off that business unit.
Do that many people really use Photoshop? For what little image editing I do, GIMP works fine; usually, the only things I ever do are crop and resize. I just don't have any reason to mess around with colors and such, let alone doing crazy stuff like putting objects on different backgrounds and the like. Resizing (like to make images 1/4 size so I can upload them at places where the full-size image is too big) is frequently done easily just with an Imagemagick script.
Are enough people really doing advanced Photoshop editing to hold back Linux adoption?
Yep, and look what an astounding success the ADAM was in the market.
The ADAM didn't have the smartest engineering design, either: the power supply was in the printer, so you couldn't run the computer without the printer being attached.
The other factor with hardware back in the 9x/ME days (and some during XP) was that most of the stability problems were caused by the hardware drivers: they were written by the hardware companies and were frequently of poor quality. Because of this, MS instituted the "WHQL" program to try to enforce driver quality.
Linux doesn't really have this problem because the drivers are all open-source, included in the kernel (and vetted and maintained by the kernel devs), and are generic to all hardware. What I mean by the latter is, if there was a class of device, such as a USB flash card reader, there'd be a handful of chips made by ASIC companies which would be used in these readers, but there'd be tons of hardware makers who would buy these small number of chips, design PCBs using the reference designs published by the ASIC companies, and sell their cheaply-made hardware on the market. There'd be many dozens of available readers, but internally they were all essentially identical. However, for Windows, each one of these little fly-by-night hardware companies would write their own device driver for the device, and include that on a disc or for download, and that's what you'd have to use to make the device work in Windows. Some would work fine, others would be buggy and make Windows crash. It didn't matter that the hardware was all the same. But in Linux, there'd only be one driver for all the devices based on a particular ASIC, and it'd be written usually by some programmer who wanted to get it to work in Linux; it'd be submitted for inclusion in the kernel, go through some rounds of code review, and finally be included, and maintained for perpetuity. As soon as that one driver was included, suddenly all the devices, by all the mfgrs, based on that one ASIC would work in Linux, and with only one driver, the likelihood of bugs would be far less.
You can check out any time you like; but you can never leave... with your data, at least not easily.
You mean "their data". It's not your data when you post it to Facebook, it's theirs, you've given it to them.
Maybe at a few companies (companies are all different, after all, just like people), but not at many, if you look at the adoption figures for Win8. Also, companies usually treat IT as a cost center, and because of that, they frequently try to cut its budget to the bone because it doesn't actually generate any profit for the company (though its operations are essential for the operation of the business and making money). So if the IT manager tells the CEO that he wants a bunch of money for the latest MS upgrade, when they just spent a fortune upgrading to Win7 a couple years ago, that's probably not going to be well received. Heck, one of those hack-n-slash CEOs will see that as an opportunity to cut the IT budget, sack the IT director, have this shown to be a giant cost savings and improvement to the company's bottom line, and justify a big bonus for himself.
My wife used to be much more religious and went to "non-denominational" Christian churches years ago. She tells me about how they constantly preached that "unequally yoked" crap, yet in the church there'd be rather few single people, and a 10-to-1 (or worse) ratio of single women to single men. On top of that, while the girls would usually be fairly cute (according to her), the one or two men would be creeps with handlebar mustaches and the like.
Yes, but the overall company strategy depends on the CEO, and Win8 and Metro are big parts of a big new strategy for them. They aren't just some thing that Ballmer took 5 minutes to look at and say yes to.