What would it take to supplant MS?

[Deokoria]

Even without the gaming argument, I think it will be tough for anyone to make serious dents in MS sales. I know that my company alone has a revolving lease with Dell that involves over 25,000 machines a year. All of our internal applications are written for MS. We have multiple agreements with MS that let us purchase software dirt cheap (employees can even purchase personal copies of the software like MS Office for $19 for their home computers). There's no way that the company is going to wake up one day and decide that they want to start from scratch and go with a different operating system. Because of the company usage, pretty much everyone who works there is going to buy an MS machine for home use because that's what they know how to use and it will be compatible with the work machine. Then, when these people have children, they learn on this home machine and become MS users, too. All this makes it just 'easier' to buy an MS machine. It seems that this same type of culture would exist at other large corporations, too, making it very hard to get the average computer customer to buy something other than MS.

Then again, I like MS.

[Riek]

Yep,

Have to agree with Deokoria here. Our company has approximately 70,000 desktop machines and servers worldwide that run some sort of MS product, and these are refreshed every second year. MS would not let this contract vaporize from under them in a pink fit and the company would not ever be brave enough (or stupid enough from a support perspective) to make the jump to another OS.

Likewise, any employee can salary sacrifice a Dell or IBM machine for their home use at a pretty decent discount, so on top of the 70k work machines, there are a whole heap of personally owned machines that people are getting at cheap rates and utlizing pre-tax dollars to buy. I simply cannot see Apple breaking into the corporate market, and thus getting flow on benefits to home users any time soon.

[Gesslar]

I would never suggest getting rid of them entirely. Almost every business is a microsoft shop, at this point anyway.

But, over time company IT models change. They move from one solution to another. Moving from IIS to Apache, moving from MS SQL to MySQL, etc.. these are all backend issues. The client portion doesn't -have- to change.

I'm just saying that they could. And I don't hate MS, I hate that it'll have been an almost 10 year wait before their browser to be made modern. That part really really irks me. MS really wanted to be a part of the browser market. So they did everything and became number one in said market. Now, their browser (which has about 90% desktop share) is dragging the rest of the web down with it because of its buggy implementations of standards that almost any other modern browser can render perfectly; but nobody knows how these pages are supposed to look unless the website coder TAILORS to the bugs. Imagine breaking off bits of your car just to get it to fit into your garage.