Is Microsoft on the ropes right now?  It certainly seems so with the high levels of attacks they’ve been levying on the Linux and Mac market (even though M$ does own most of Mac, I’d call their attacks on Apple merely a charade for the public).

It may seem like they’re clearly trying to take the lead, but everyone in psychology is familiar with the defence mechanism, which alludes to the possibility that Microsoft is about to have a corporate-equivalent of a stroke.

And honestly, if I were Microsoft I’d be sweating it too.  Its getting to the point where Ubuntu Linux is matching OSX in the eye candy factor (though I’d argue its been vastly superior for years now, especially since XGL and Beryl came onto the scene), its much faster than 7 or XP, in many arenas, much more secure than Vista or OSX (“Vista SP2 most secure OS”…yeah…right, apparently they’ve never encountered OpenBSD or the grsecurity Linux kernel, even the NSA likes Linux), and invariably cheaper (who wants to spend money on an OS AND have to pay for support when they can have a free OS that works most of the time and you only have to pay for support when/if you need it, but even then, there’s plenty of documentation around the web about how to do things, so you really don’t even have to pay for support, though the same could be said about Windows, but sometimes there’s that one situation no one has ever tried before).

So it could be very good news for us Linux fans.  With Google’s Chrome OS coming up (albeit its not truly Linux, it does at the very least include the Linux kernel), OSX on the rise, and Windows 7 on shaky grounds (with the MS Word injunction, and all of the anti-trust litigation surmounting M$ right now); it could very well be the start of the decline of Microsoft’s empire.

You know what they say, everything with a beginning, must have an end.

Now a little of arguing in favor of Microsoft but not in the normal way.  Windows is a business OS, I don’t think anyone can really question that.  Sure it has some entertainment features and such but I’d argue where Microsoft makes its big bucks is in the corporate world.

Indeed they do offer things that the other OS’s are lacking on.  Namely centralized management and policy instantiation.  On Linux its a bit more difficult to control users in a global environment from a centralized point.  Now I’ll probably have people arguing against that point, but honestly the Linux community does need to start pumping resources into a centralized environment that you can do anything from.

Now I’m not saying that’s how environments should be, I’m just tagging along the argument that a lot of companies have against using Linux.  Personally, I think the Windows environment (as a programmer, and a .Net developer at that) has some serious issues, but overall is a good way of working with Windows.  Linux has a very good environment but what it lacks is a central way of working with it in a cohesive manner to all.  Where a developer could run into ActiveDirectory administration and understand what’s going on, or vice versa; that doesn’t exactly work on Linux so much.

As a purist, I’d rather Linux stay a high-end/hobby OS (used by powerful/stable servers and power users alike), but if you want it to take off and become more successful, there needs to be a centralization.  You might think that’s a bastardization of Linux and will probably water down the OS, and I totally agree, but as it stands right now, I’d argue that Linux/UNIX is too advanced for the general population.

For the same reason that people don’t understand why RISC is superior and x86 CISC is antiquated, they won’t understand why their “My Pretty Pony” game doesn’t work on Linux.  Its an advanced argument that deals a lot with advanced computing topics.

Do you want to dumb the whole thing down so users will understand it. or do you want to leave it where it is, in wonderful harmony where we know we have the superior OS from many standpoints, untainted by the craziness of the mainstream world?  I’m choosing the latter.