[Halfmanhalfamazing]

There is one area where Linux could well gain traction in 2008, and that’s at the cheap end of the spectrum. As prices fall and $200 PCs become a reality, neither Microsoft nor Mac will be able to provide an OS cheap enough to offer value for money. $200 PCs don’t have huge appeal and are going to have to sell themselves (because two hundred bucks won’t allow for a lavish advertising budget) but they are likely to sell well nonetheless – after all, every geek could do with a cheap PC.

[tutstar]

gnip...

[bigdcaldavis]

I think Apple would win out for these two reasons:

1. The Linux community is too fractured. (Meaning you have your Ubuntuphiles and your PCLinuxOS-ites and the Xandrosians and the Linspire-whatevers and the SUSE-whatevers and the Fedoraphiles.)

2. No one Linux distribution company has the marketing power of Apple. I would dare say they don’t have even 1/10th Apple’s marketing power. Apple can afford huge multi-million dollar ad blitzes. The Linux distro companies cannot afford the same and must rely basically on “word of mouth” advertising, aka the “Jack Tramiel method”, and IIRC, the last Tramiel company that relied on the “Jack Tramiel method” went out of business and got sold to a disk drive manufacturer (yes, I’m talking about when Atari went out of business and merged with Jugi Tandon Storage).