Al,

"BeOS never reached the tipping point, along with many others. Not enough people felt they'd garner a net benefit from using it."

Right - a replacement OS would have to be pretty damned compelling to bump Windows off of most peoples' machines, in one swell foop that is.

"To gain traction, maybe you could delay desktop replacement, start with some other area - maybe Internet infrastructure ..."

I've got some ideas. :-)

"
>Clue: Just about everything I'm proposing could be simulated by software running on existing PCs running Windows.

Not sure what you're getting at here ..."

What I mean is that several oldish PCs running Windows could provide something like some of the hardware boxes that the entire system would have in the ideal world.

Zane