Microsoft sold a large amount of Windows 7 licenses - see: <a href="http://beta.thehindu.com/business/article96694.ece" rel="nofollow">http://beta.thehindu.com/business/article96694.ece</a><p>People use Windows because they like it and they can do a lot of work with this operating system. Stop believing that people use Windows because they are forced to.<p>As for the rest of this article, I have the feeling I'm being fed with a list of peremptory choices based on little or no field experience.<p>I'd like to see more examples of strategic choices of choosing an OS vs another and the impact it had on a deployment.
> I will stay away from free products based on Linux and some comodity servers, I will focus only on commercially supported products with provide reliability.<p>A company will feel no shame in using Linux and commodity servers. Not everything needs to have a support contract attached to it, quite the contrary.<p>My rule is simpler: laptops are macs, servers are linux on commodity machines (or VPS) and windows sits in virtual machines for testing.
The article is taking one of two stances, but never formally (or clearly) states which. Either it's arguing that Windows is irrelevant because there is comparable software for no cost, or that the continued existence of Windows as an OS is pointless.<p>I'll freely admit that I host <i>all</i> my websites on a Linux machine. As a web server Linux is just better for PHP & Ruby. My development is on a Dell Studio 1555 with Windows 7, since I cannot afford the Mac price tag (I even got this one on a $150 off sale!).<p>But I still don't see why a $20 billion market is "irrelevant".<p>Now, that $20 billion is partly due to the fact of all the pent up demand for a working version of Vista. Remember that when ME flopped XP sold quite well... so it's not irrational to assume that W7 has prospered thanks to the failure of Vista.
... and so is Linux, apparently, since the world is about to switch to Macs on the desktop. That comes naturally once the admins have had to to learn BSD by picking non-Linux-based server/backend solutions. Excuse me while I go hold my breath.