How about a comparison on merit, not marketing 1504

At the low end, who needs a branded OS at all? There is no real face to it unless it has some UI display, but most non-GP computers in such embedded use only have a minimal display. I don't disagree that Windows has no future in this market at all. Microsoft may have some future, but apparatus companies do not cotton to the notion of paying license fees for copies of their apparatus in general. They would treat the embedded code as part of their design process and keep it as a sort of trade secret, IMO. That's what we did with numerical control units, anyway. If we had a cutesy way of doing something, we weren't about to give it to our compebreastors and I can't imagine an off-the-shelf solution in that industry.

As to the eventual saturation and possible decline of the desktop market, I don't disagree there either. Microsoft is a highly recognized brand that people have come to rely on for an expected level of quality and consistency that they, in spite of the japes and sneers of the cola folk, are satisfied with. To this group of consumers, the reliability of the fulfillment of their expectations is enough reason to choose Mr. Softee as their platform supplier.

The dissidents are hardly appeased, of course, and will be dissidents no matter what. I do think it kind of comical where they so attribute their dissonance to superior intellect, though. They paint a picture of how they have come to heroically resist the Borg and most act like they have buttummed the mantle of saviour of the less fortunate. It makes me want to LOL!!!

On the server side, as I have posted many times, the influence of linux is mostly felt by the traditional unix vendors who have been MOL forced into a pricing war vis-a-vis Intel. They are losing their high margin sales where they customarily applied their own brand of Unix to the more generic Intel PC hardware powered by Windows or linux. They were perhaps better equipped to withstand incursions by Windows and the past couple of years has shown their vulnerability to linux. Whether this is the same linux value proposition that was popular amongst the cola folk in 1998 before IBM started the fire burning or not is a matter for continued debate. Statistically, Windows is still gaining in the server space and has a sizeable revenue and some half of the unit volume as reported by just about all the stats services.