But I agree you with. It's very fashionable with some to get start these goofy OS wars. I've come to recognize most of the participants are trying very hard to establish themselves as "alpha-geeks" because they see that as a valuable identity.

My actual job title is Linux Engineer...and my work desktop is Win7 in an AD domain. That's the real world, and I couldn't care less. I Putty in to the servers I'm responsible for. Getting something else on my workstation is so low on my list of priorities, it would be a negative number if that were possible. OS evangelism has always befuddled me.

Having said that, MS's entrenchment in the corporate desktop game, including AD's role, is nothing more than pure momentum. Back when Novell still mattered, their product was much more technically elegant than even current MS products are with regards to enterprise desktop management. MS is familiar and easy to administer....which is not to be confused with stable, flexible, and cost effective.

Smart management in a new businesses would try to avoid the MS treadmill. I don't mean MS-Office and Windows, but server-side. The mish-mash of products....Exchange, SharePoint, AD, MSSQL,.....etc etc etc.....create a very unnecessary, and in several cases, inferior tangle for businesses with a bit of expertise in something else. However, once a business gets entangled, it will be much harder to get out.