Winux

I have to disagree with that part but not the rest. Isn't Open source successful because it is Open Source? Many programmers and techno geeks can contribute to the improvment of an Open source project. Can you contribute to the MS closed source project? You can start up a company and make inproved enhansments on microsoft products then sell them but you need to pay money to microsoft for a licence etc.. I also don't believe quality gets sacrificed for profit, they old the quilty back and sell it to you as a solution to all your problems, which starts an ongoing cash cycle. Which I think is standard practice for any major corporate organisation.

Software gets worse as it gets older not better. It gets further and further away from what you need now, but in terms of customer and business requirements. As a for instance.
Security is a much bigger thing now than it used to be. MS struggles in this area simply because their original OS design and the business marketing plan around it, never had security as a key requirement hence the multiplicity of patches and the multiplicity of requirements for patching.

I'd love to see them going open source, I can think of more than a few projects I'd be happy to contribute to, but while the OS is closed and basically opaque to devlopers, it will be a waste of time. Ther's no point in building a high quality house on crap foundations.

1. You are copying a bunch of files from one place to another. There's one file with the same name at the destination. The system asks you if you want to overwrite the file. You say no, which causes the whole copy operation to be aborted and leaves you with no option but to repeat the whole copy operation.

2. If you install programs often, every six months or so you have to reinstall Windows in order to get rid of the junk that tends to pile up until it gets unmanageable. Nobody ever considered the possibility of keeping the OS separate from the stuff that gets embedded in it afterwards.

3. You copy an installed Windows to another machine. It ceases to work.

4. Your Windows is installed on an NTFS partition. A small boot file gets corrupted and you completely lose access to your HD. (I faced this problem a while ago and the only way I found to get the system back & running, short of reinstalling Windows, was to boot with Knoppix Linux on a CD.)

5. Knoppix Linux boots from a CD in five minutes, recognizing all your hardware and implementing a GUI that is better than Windows. Windows takes one hour minimum, requires successive boots and still demands specific drivers for your hardware.

My point here is that (a) Windows is basically a dumb beast; (b) it won't get better because the architecture is flawed. Its success is a huge feat of marketing. What happens here – as we have been seeing for years with the successive irrelevant versions of Office – is that you get to a point where you can only embellish your creature, but it's still the same beast underneath. Windows has reached the baroque era – oh, what if we add a cute little dog that waves its tail to the user and call it "user-friendly"?

Given the huge resources it has, Microsoft could certainly come up with a better OS. But Microsoft, like Bill Gates, is humorless – and humor, as we all know, is a side effect of creativity and intelligence. If you ever tried to read the cryptic help files of any MS product, you know what I mean.

Microsoft too me appear to be Greedy, they make crap loads of money and aim to make crap loads more. But they have other goals as well. See http://www.microsoft.com for the lowdown on M$ goals.

In every thing I've seen to do with economics and business success the people/corporate entities with the money/profit, are ones who are greedy not proud.

If you have a good money making idea and you unleash it in the market protection or no protection, some one in china will rip it off and if not china then India, not India the USA etc.., people get ripped of to strengthen economies.

MS can take pride in there work but If someone else comes up with a better idea, do they just ignore them and say our idea is better, you won't bet me because we are proud, of course not, else we wouldn't' have windows to start with.

If something else can do it better, so will windows.

stealing from mac. look how windows started :)

"To do so would open them up to patent law suites and copywrite violation charges just as they level at everyone else."

Okay, how would that work? Novell and Red Hat market Linux without being subjected to law suits.

"...they would have to rebild their entire buisness model,..."

Why couldn't they establish a Linux division with a model different from the rest of MS, more similar to a support service provider like RH? I agree it's not likely, but is there anything, technological or legal, to prevent it?

"...as people could, and would build clones of the products from the source code."

Again, this doesn't keep RH, Novell, and others from making money.

If MS did start offering a Linux distribution, I think you'd see far more proprietary software companies expand their product offerings beyond just Windows apps. Do you think game developers would continue to ignore Linux if there was an MS distro?