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When your lease is up, they force you to upgrade.

Exacly, people are not going to do that. I run windows 2000. Both servers and desktops. I do not plan to upgrade. I urge my customers not to upgrade too. There are almost no benefits to XP and way too much hassle.

What is needed is a windows clone. You could build it on top of the LINUX or one of the Berkley UNIX kernels. But it needs Drives C D E etc and the same slash for directories. It needs to work just like windows. It needs to use a windows compatable file system too. The KDE user interface is fine if the set up stuff mimiced windows. Setting IP addresses, maping remote directories and drives, and printer set up needs to be very much like windows. The key to acceptancs is a system people can use without aditional training. It needs to handle files just like windows and it needs to be an operating system that can serve or be a desktop. It must coexist and be very similiar to windows in setup and administration. It has to be as close to windows as a Ford is to a Chevie.

How many million copies whould you have to sell for 39 bucks to be rich?

If any Windows IT guy could set it up with zero help or instruction you could eat MS for breakfast and feed Balmer to your pet aligator for lunch.

About the only real reason to keep windows on a system is for games. Linux games are around, but not all of the latest and most popular games have been ported to Linux.

I honestly believe that MS is digging it's own grave with it's roadmap. People got a taste of where they are going with XP's activation scheme. The architecture is now there for them to turn their next monster (Longhorn) into the subscription operating system that they will force the consumer into. And this crap with Palladium that they are trying to pull (getting the hardware makers to build DRM into the hardware) can conceivably destroy demand for new hardware and software on the Wintel platform.