MS makes yet another smart move 1726

I don't see why anyone would expect any mainstream OS to die off any time soon. Speaking as someone that buys a lot of PC's on a continuing basis, it has become just so easy to walk into Joe BigBox and buy a $500 cpu with WinXP on it that just flat out does just about everything the end user wants.

I think Office may be in trouble on the home user platform, but I think MS may have already countered with their low price "teacher and student" license for 3 home PC's. I wonder though, when Open Office hits v 2.1 and is stable, functional, and free, how long will it take for it to begin serious market penetration. This dovetails into the comparison of how many folks in the home market just pirate a copy of Office, couldn't care less, and wouldn't go to the effort of downloading OpenOffice in order to be legal.

I sit here posting with Netscape on Slackware 9.1; (will go to 10.1 next month). Personally, I think a multi platform environment with multiple CPU's, a big monitor, and an 8 port KVM switch is truly the way to fly. Total environment here, 1 XP, 2 W2K, 1 WinMillenium, 1 NT4.0sp6a (stablist windows ever made), 1 Slack 9.1, 1 Slack 10.0, and 1 Win 98 to run a 16 bit ISA (relay IO) card that I find interesting. I love Linux for surfing, gimp, inet server, and file server functions; I like windows for cheapskate media, banking, access, word & excel, mapping (Street Atlas-TopoUSA-Garmin Metroguide), PDA linkage, as well as writing code for dollars.

I keep thinking I ought to hunt ebay for an inexpensive Mac with an early OS X, just to add to the picture, but to be honest, I worked with a friend's Mac not to long ago and it didn't seem to me to be much different than any other $2k machine I'd played with at the time.

Ten years from now, I would not be surprised to see more folks with multiple platforms. In the past it was one thing to throw away an 8mhz IBM XT and replace it with a 25 mhz 386, but throwing away a 3ghz machine with 200 gig of storage.. I don't think so. It used to be we only tolerated the slow processing of that 8086 because the alternative we compared it against was spending hours manually computing a ledger spreadsheet, so when a machine took what was once a 1 hour calculation on the 8088 and did it in 5 minutes, it was enough to relagate that 8088 to the trash. Now we are talking about machines that will play DVD's in real time, capture and store video in real time, compute anything realistic in a few seconds, etc. Ten years from now, that 3ghz machine will still play DVD's in real time, etc. There is no reason to expect that machine to end up in the junk pile; someone might buy an additional machine to do something else, perhaps to sit beside the TV in the living room and play-record HDTV, games, network surfing via voice command; but that 3ghz machine will still be banging out stuff as always, at least until it hits its full operational life expectancy and fries the CPU or memory chip.

Multiplatform is the wave of the future, and that includes both *nix and microsoft.