[mdittmar]

but users have been trained to expect their computers to behave in a certain...Microsofty way.

and there is the genius of Gates.

He had the vision to see what was to come, got there first,made,bought,stoled,depending on ones point of view,a great product,and now he owns the market.

[Arkinsaw]

He had the vision to see what was to come, got there first,made,bought,stoled,depending on ones point of view,a great product,and now he owns the market.

True. And you are not going to compete with him just by making your operating system behave the opposite of his. People have come to expect their computers to operate the way he laid down. If you try to be non-Microsoft for the sake of being non-Microsoft, you users will get frustrated. Even if your idea of how it should work is better, its still frustrating as hell for the average non-geek user.

Put your scroll bar on the opposite side of applications and have it work slightly different? It will drive people nuts, or at least drive off many potential adopters. Its good to do things better, but familiar is better to most.

I hope Linux can compete in the home market, because competition is good. But Linux will really have to go on a major user-friendliness kick, and de-geekify a bit, to ever have a real shot.

[clyde asbury]

[Gates] owns the market.

Economic history is filled with tales of businesses that "owned the market," "had a lock on the market," or in some other way had it made.

The same was said about A & P grocery stores years ago. Sears is about one-fifth the size of Wal-Mart today.

Gates is personally set for life, yes. Microsoft itself has nowhere to go but down.

[antiRepublicrat]

He had the vision to see what was to come,

Not quite. When this "Internet thing" started taking off, Bill dismissed it as a sideshow for geeks and academic institutions. He staked his money in online services such as AOL, thus creating his MSN as competition.

After everyone else had jumped on board the Internet bandwagon, Bill said "oh crap, I'm late," bought a browser from someone, didn't gain marketshare, gave it away for free and got a bit more, then decided to include it in the next version of Windows as a way to get it on everyone's desktop (and restricted OEM's from even putting a link to Netscape).

Bill was quite late to the game since he had no vision. But he did very well at leveraging his OS power to make up for that lack of vision.