Agree fully on Linux not being the thing the user push their mouse at.
But I am planning to consolidate on my personal park to use 1 Win and 1 Linux as installed
base server OS on main Desktop and both work laps, but mostly work only from VM's.

On each floor one of my old and useless laptops to have a keyboard and screen ready
without noise and minimal energy drain to be awakened and used as remote screen.

Perhaps those will be running Linux as well - they are so weak I might classify
a port as security measure adding to perf ;-)

Point is - the need for Win as replacement OS fpor new machines will drop.
Users can stay longer with the OS they painstakingly personalized.
But I never claimed to be normal and even I will use Win as "interactive OS" ;-)

>Microsoft continues to feel pressure from Linux as a server, but Linux desktop is dead. Vista is dead. Users are quickly moving to Win7. IMO, Vista was a great product. Microsoft totally missed on the marketing side of it. Apple made huge inroads with their anti Vista ads. If Microsoft would have made two or three well placed ads explaining why Vista had the changes it did, things would have been different.
>
>>Agree with most of the points, but the flip side is that Linux
>>through price pressure contiues to lower prices for MS products.
>>Vista has shown MS that customers are not jumping on new offerings
>>and subscription models are hard to establish


The company I work for often had pure Dell turn of the century and they were telling it everybody.
Now about 1/3, and one machine is giving trouble with the USB port in some VM setups and driver versions.

>My last four or five PCs have been from Dell. On my most recent purchase, I got Win7 Home, but replaced it with Ultimate as I already had a license for it. There were a couple of drivers I was having trouble finding and called Dell Tech support. They did their job, but it was really annoying that the support guy didn't want to budge from his script.
>
>>Are you bullish for Dell as a company ? And not much current success in the non x86 area there as well.
>
.....

Agree, they are probably at the forefront of currently standardized HTML5.
When MS (together with Mozilla) buried Web SQL and now IndexDB is the coming prince
I smelled a rat - but the affair was done in a way nobody can point fingers in their direction.

>Go do some research on Microsoft's compliance with HTML 5 standards and you'll be surprised. They're very, very close to it and IE10 speed is impressive. We just need to keep in mind that the HTML 5 standard is not yet official and no company is fully compliant at this point.
>
>There are several high-level, publically visible people inside Microsoft that are pushing for web standard compliance and openness. I don't see that changing.