Good points Binos, however...
I can't agree that Linux "...... is a loooooooong way from being suitable for use by the "any idiot" fraternity". Ubuntu, Kanotix and SuSE distros are pretty much there. They're certainly infinitely easier to install and use and update than DOS or the 3.x Windows series. SuSE's YAST really makes installing new apps as easy as XP. Have you every tried it on a reasonably modern PC?
Things ARE a bit different, but a lot less than converting from a Boeing to an Airbus or a Seneca to a Cherokee, or any of the things that professional pilots do without too many problems. However the idea is not to produce an MS clone, but to produce something equally good or better!
As for your comments about Dell and Compaq and HP, they just
LOVE new operating systems with higher requirements! That way folks will junk their last PC and buy a new one from them that
CAN run Hasta la Vista properly!
"...wouldn't somebody, a company, a cooperative, whatever, be able to get together less than 1% of the MS budget and drag Linux into the world of being useable by "any idiot" in a relatively short time?"
Already been being done for quite a while - whaddaya think Red Hat, Novell/SuSE et al. have been up to for the last few years? And they're pretty much there - they'd be a lot further if MS wasn't leaning heavily on hardware manufacturers NOT to release drivers for Linux and to keep their specs secret so that Linux distro people have to reverse-engineer the specs to write their own drivers!
MS are !!!! scared now and using every dirty tactic in the book to slow down the Linux train - as I said, "...bribery, lies, innuendo, payoffs, threats to vendors, perversion of web and document standards and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers."
"Isn't this how the free enterprise system is suposed to work? Competition? "
Forgive me for chuckling - of course you're right, but MS have never had the slightest intention of allowing anyone else to compete on their turf - check-out Judge Jackson's "Findings of Fact" in the DOJ vs MS case at
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
The worrying thing for the more philosophically minded among you is how can a company become so rich and powerful that it can afford to ignore with impunity the courts in it's own and other countries?
Bill's vision is a Microsoft world - where MS runs on all the PCs, runs the media, runs the phones, runs the PDAs, the TVs, the camcorders; and the MS formats of image files, document files and everything else is the
de facto and preferably the
de jure standard of the world.
MS is NOT an independent or impartial arbiter. At best Microsoft is consumed by monumental
hubris if they believe that they truly know what is good for all the rest of us. We have no reason to believe it's protestations that the Microsoft way is the best way and that is why we should be doing it. On the contrary, in this information age, to have so much power and control vested in a single, supranational independent company, with it's own personal agenda is folly of the most dangerous kind.
