M$ should be worried long term. Their business model and pricing structure relies on a robust, expanding economy, with free flowing cash available for their upgrade (soft and hard) cycle. If companiesare going to tighten up their spending, then companies will either stick with the systems they have, while continuing to pay the licensing and support costs, or they may start to take a more serious look to OSS and Linux, that can provide everything they need for, oh say, 90~99% of their operations.Yes, but. If it happens that MS starts to actually feel gains by Linux and OSS, they have more than enough momentum to allow them to afford negotiating near giveaway license deals with corporations to maintain market share. Just making up numbers in my layman's head, it seems to me that $10 a seat for Windows and Office would go a long way towards persuading the more skittish CEO's to go with what they are familiar with vs what this IT kid is telling them.
Well hell, for $10 a seat for windows and office, I might even fork over some dough. But seriously, how long do you think they could sustain that model? Then you also have to consider, and granted this is all made up numbers and speculation at this point, that if a few (not a lot) large corporations make the switch before M$ responds, then there's a rather substantial loss. And I'm not just talking monetary loss, but more importantly, exposure. And execs talks. If Exec A says to Exec B, yea, I cut x Million from my IT budget by getting away from M$, that will get noticed. Sure they may not be able to completely get rid of M$, but if they can reduce their overall seats from 100% of their needs, to 10%.... And if they have in-house developers.. they could very well add to the OSS code base. IBM has already done it, and they're actually doing pretty well these days. But then IT is their actual business. Still, that's a pretty good contributor.
And of course there's no law that say you can't sell proprietary software for Linux. Just off hand: Oracle comes to mind.
Also, Schools here in Indy are already using a multitude of OS', Linux included. Kids are getting exposed. And they are of course free to download a distro and try it out. No cost to mom and dad.