My guess is that Linux is still many years from making any meaningful impact on the desktop market, if it ever does. Just now, as I sit in the CSE dungeons, a friend of mine and I can’t figure out where Firefox on Linux decided to hide some files. Linux’s problem is, as always, that there are too many options, so nothing is uniform, and its hard to make things work without this uniformity.

This uniformity is also the genius and curse of Windows. It makes it easy to build products for Windows; it also makes it easy to build exploits of Windows. Apple sometimes seems like the best of both worlds, because it takes a more friendly-appearing/open-looking approach, but locks it down at several levels to prevent unmanageable explosions of options (ie, very restricted hardware, many fewer programs to support). Several orders of magnitude fewer customers also makes the management of their OS much easier.

I guess the point is, Windows, in my opinion, is one of the best things that ever happened to computing. It works on a truly staggering array of hardware, on tens or hundreds of millions of computers in all sorts of languages and configurations with a huge variety of skilled and unskilled users, and, for the most part, it just works. That is an astounding achievement that neither the Linux nor Apple camps can claim honestly, in my opinion.

Now, I am not an MS apologist; I think their innovation has stagnated and there are all sorts of ethical and judgment problems with their business decisions. But that doesn’t change the incredible accomplishments of the company and its software.

*steps off soapbox*

Oh, higher resolution cardinal pictures would be nice!