It seems that Microsoft these days does nothing but make idiotic business moves. At one point Microsoft thought they had the entire computer ecosystem on lock-down, but things are changing rapidly. Major threats to Microsoft include the Open Source movement and Google. Microsoft's mainstay is by far the Windows operating system. Windows these days survives often not due to the fact that it's excessively innovative or well functioning, but rather because everyone is used to it. Its 16 year+ history has a lot to do with its success. Eight years ago the operating system was still quite buggy, but Windows 2000 and the still popular XP stabilized that.

These days Microsoft has to contend with bloat. They can attempt to differentiate to change the game, but the fact is that users, especially power users, want more control over their systems. Having the rights and freedom to install whatever software you need at the drop of a hat makes Open Source software by far a better choice than anything proprietary, but only in places where the software is mature. This is often not common. Open Source software tends to have an organic nature where competition visions are producing 5 different pieces of software that supposedly do the same thing. The problem is not the design choice, but rather the work hours put into the final product. A product that has more work hours put into it to a good extent is going to be better than a product which was half-ass'd. Design decisions matter, but time invested matters more. The fragmentation of OSI is far more damaging to the end-users than the potential for bad UI and so on. Despite these problems OSI is rapidly maturing. Where it was a toy OS for the longest time, professional pieces of software that were already mature such as Open Office and Eclipse have brought quite a bit of life into the movement. On top of this, Shuttleworth is delivering Ubuntu in 6 month iteration, each iteration improving Linux on the desktop. At this point I have personally switched over to Linux as my primary operating system.

Further, virtualization technology means that you no longer need to run Windows all the time, you can run it only when you need it and the technology to do that also is available free whether through Xen, KVM, or VirualBox. The performance of these machines is adorable and Linux has a tendency not to get caught by the crufty problems of Windows.

Driver support, another main contention of OSI is also rapidly closing the gap between Windows and Linux. .Many major manufacturers of video cards have announced Open Source drivers and will be releasing them in the next few years. Firefox is also gaining huge ground with users switching over to the excellent browser. When considering all of these factors and looking for Microsoft's strengths, it seems that Microsoft is playing a losing game. They have a lot of the market, but it's only for reasons of brand. Linux is quickly closing any competitive gaps, and once those are gone, all Microsoft offers is a bloated proprietary system that costs 100s of dollars.

Further system manufacturers have started adopting Linux into their offerings, and things for Microsoft simply do not look good in the near future.