The Mac has made steady and significant inroads in the past couple of years. It has grown by 15% in one year. Linux is still waiting to break through on the desktop, but is strong on servers, embedded devices and in emerging markets.
Microsoft has been shaken by this and other news, including a survey this past week that showed IT professionals refuse to touch Vista with something like 80% giving it a big thumbs down. Many of them are looking towards the Mac and Linux. M$ dubbed the report as bogus, but I am sure they are concerned. They can't be happy with losing money and its falling shares give them less to play with. They have made some bad decisions and no longer look invincible.They lost on backing HDDVD, can't move the X-box and the Zune is a failure. They insist that Vista is not a failure, but then they have to, until they have something better. On the bright side for Linux, more and more drivers are on the way. Hardware compatibility issues should start to disappear. Best Buy is selling Linux for $19.99. Will people pay? We will have to wait and see. Roy Linux: Fast, friendly, flexible and .... free! Support Open source. <*,)}}+< Only dead fish go with the flow! ----- Original Message ---- From: Robert C Wittig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 6:34:24 AM Subject: Re: [LINUX_Newbies] BBC E-mail: Microsoft backs open source work Alex Baker wrote: > The threat of a lawsuit is often a bigger weapon that the lawsuit itself. > > If I threaten to sue, many will be cowed by the thought of an expensive fight. > > If my grounds are not a slam dunk, the possibility exists that I might > lose the lawsuit and thus the use of that weapon for all time. > > Most armies do not want to go to war. They just want the enemy to > think that they will. > It may be my imagination (because I am biased strongly in favour of *nix), but it seems to me that Linux, and BSD to a lesser extent, are slowly and steadily gaining ground. Although I have never used it myself, Ubuntu seems to have been the most recent tipping point. Just yesterday while scanning through a MicroCenter (local U.S. chain of computer stores), I noticed laptops offering either Vista or Ubuntu, with Ubuntu being several hundred dollars less, for the same machine. -- -wittig http://www.robertwi ttig.com/ http://robertwittig .net/ http://robertwittig .org/ .. __________________________________________________________________ Instant Messaging, free SMS, sharing photos and more... Try the new Yahoo! Canada Messenger at http://ca.beta.messenger.yahoo.com/ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from this list, please email [EMAIL PROTECTED] & you will be removed.Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
