My picture is the following...
So.. HOW COULD the world rid itself of this insufferable M$-Virus ... in any orderly, comprehensible and clearly achievable process?
IBM showed how it's done. If the hardware is designed properly, you can swap out the OS, or the hardware under the OS, without issues.
VMWare showed us how to run different OSes on PC hardware simultaneously. VirtualBox showed that you can do the same thing for free. (MS's Win7 requires a VM to run lots of Win32 software now ("XP mode").)
MS opened up lots of their file formats, eventually; but still had proprietary bits underneath to prevent others having 100% file-format compatibility.
These folks know how to make it easy on their customers to keep working with their data as the hardware and OS changes, if they really want to do that.
MS could get rid of lots of their zero-day vulnerabilities as a result of carrying around all the DOS and WinNT baggage. They could have an open API on a modern kernel if they want. But instead they want to maintain their Office and Server API monopolies, and keep locking everyone into Winders, and in the process have built such a huge, fragile edifice that they can't come up with a compelling tablet solution. They keep designing their new OSes to require faster and more expensive hardware to force upgrades. Not because their OS makes things better for users, but because they get so much money from the PC OEMs. Their monopolistic practices, and lack of backward compatibility between WinPhone versions, have doomed their hope of having a meaningful fraction of the phone OS space (among other things).
Imagine trying to run Windows on Raspberry Pi... (I just got an e-mail that Brian has ported File Commander/L to RPi -
http://silk.apana.or...2development.html (scroll down).)
What are big companies going to do? I assume tablets are going to be more and more important, so lots of stuff is going to be in the Cloud. It eases backup concerns, and networks are fast enough that people don't need TB Office Suites sitting on a hard drive any more. (Yes, the cloud will always have reliability issues; but one can store a lot of stuff on 64 GB flash memory tablets between syncing...) Stuff on the Cloud needs VMs and databases. They don't need MS Office - other office suites are often "good enough". Given that assumption, I assume that MS Office and the like will be run in VMs if it's needed. Presumably MS will try to make that expensive, but customers will have a lot more leverage on pricing than they have in the past...
It's not hopeless, but it is frustrating that it has taken 20+ years to get to this point...
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.