Microsoft has serious plans to do away with Windows

Not the most adaptable...

It's not survival of the most adaptable, it's survival of the one with the biggest club and most money in the marketing department - VHS vs Betamax, Blueray vs HD-DVD, Word vs Word Perfect, Windows vs OS/2, Windows vs Netware, etc. were all won by inferior products but better marketing.

Vista is the biggest marketing advantage Linux has ever had but with all the variants out there, most with no corporate-level support infrastructure, it'll still struggle to break into the corporate desktop world (Apple's been trying feebly to do this for years and still hasn't succeeded).

corporate support

You are right, in fact I am running a SLED 10 SP1 box - it is amazingly stable, secure (as far as I can say...) and, yes, beautiful.
A couple of remarks, however, are, in my opinion, necessary:

a) SLED 10 makes it difficult to allow your computer to install newer third parties applications. This is something you always need to do in a corporate environment, where sometimes you need to launch a video DVD prepared by a client, work on multimedia files and similar operations. Unless you open a [virtual] Windows session you are likely to be unable to be 100% productive. This MUST be fixed by Novell - somehow, I do not know, but they MUST fix it. Computing corporate use is no longer a text, spreadsheet and presentation paradigm only.

b) Novell support is ok as far as you have your SLED 10 box untouched - i.e. if you run it with no third parties software. Again, if I do so I keep my productivity to a minimum, unless I have an internal support team (but then Novell would earn almost nothing...).

c) corporate use has certain requirements, which are, at least for me, key and basic. One for all: full hard drive encryption along with pre-boot authentication. With SLED this is a pain in the *ss, and this MUST be fixed.

In a few words, when it is about corporate use, it is not only staying with a hyper-tested and locked operating system, it is also about understanding that corporate use means a lot of [unpredictable] user behaviours and needs and this is when the stakes raise.

Now, I like Linux, I like my SLED box, but honestly, for this to be adequate to today's corporate use requirements, much more effort must be put in.

you're gonna hate this, but for the most part you are right

Vista has problems. Linux can't capitalize because the Open Source movement is so fractured with hundreds of operating system distributions, Corporate America (and the rest of the world) are scared off by the lack of stability. No one knows what the next hot distro will be, so stay with Windows. It's stable. Not stable from an OS perspecive, but from a marketing perspective.

By the way, I lived through the OS/2 - Windows wars. OS/2 was vastly superior. Microsoft knew that, but understood the market much better than IBM.

IBM charged $1000 for a developer kit. MS gave them away for free. Guess who had the most applications to go with the OS? MS beat IBM simply because the user applications were plentiful and functional. Note, I did not say wonderful, just functional. People bought the OS for the applications.

Big problem with Open Source is the peripherals. Printer drivers specifically. To the average user, they need to be able to put a disk in and install the driver. Not so with Linux. Very geeky solutions that may require compiling the driver for your Linux distro.

Even finding the driver can be a difficult path. I found one for my printer with a rating of "Works, Mostly". Now that instills confidence! Not good enough for the average person to adopt Open Source for that level of service.

Even Vista has printer drivers and video drivers, and other drivers that simply install from Disk. Not so with Linux. Getting better but still highly distro dependant.

Yes, vista has problems, but perceived problems with Open Source are much higher.

what drivel

QUOTE
Vista has problems. Linux can't capitalize because the Open Source movement is so fractured with hundreds of operating system distributions, Corporate America (and the rest of the world) are scared off by the lack of stability. No one knows what the next hot distro will be, so stay with Windows. It's stable. Not stable from an OS perspecive, but from a marketing perspective.

REBUTTAL
Untrue. There are actually about 3 main distros. The Redhat series, Debian Series and Gentoo series. Users are "scared" off because they are ignorant. Ignorance breeds fear and fear breeds inertia.

QUOTE
By the way, I lived through the OS/2 - Windows wars. OS/2 was vastly superior. Microsoft knew that, but understood the market much better than IBM.

OBSERVATION
Yep. I lived through it too. OS2 was technically superior but ran like a dog.

QUOTE
IBM charged $1000 for a developer kit. MS gave them away for free. Guess who had the most applications to go with the OS? MS beat IBM simply because the user applications were plentiful and functional. Note, I did not say wonderful, just functional. People bought the OS for the applications.

OBSERVATION
Yep. I agree. I was "there".

QUOTE
Big problem with Open Source is the peripherals. Printer drivers specifically. To the average user, they need to be able to put a disk in and install the driver. Not so with Linux. Very geeky solutions that may require compiling the driver for your Linux distro.
Even finding the driver can be a difficult path. I found one for my printer with a rating of "Works, Mostly". Now that instills confidence! Not good enough for the average person to adopt Open Source for that level of service.

REBUTTAL
Nonsense. This might have been true 5 to 10 years ago but any mainstream laser will most of the time plug via USB into a Linux box. The Linux box will see it, recognise it, load the right module and have a test page in your hand _without even needing an installation CD full of cruft_. I recommend Samsung.

QUOTE
Even Vista has printer drivers and video drivers, and other drivers that simply install from Disk. Not so with Linux. Getting better but still highly distro dependant.

REBUTTAL
Unmitigated garbage. Simply avoid such problems by being educated about what manufacturers make good peripherals.

QUOTE
Yes, vista has problems, but perceived problems with Open Source are much higher.

REBUTTAL
Gah where to begin. These perceptions are fuelled by posts like this.

May I follow this up with a few observations of my own. I own an IT company. Nothing big but we look after a few folks. Maybe 40 windows machines, 8 linux servers and 2 macs. The only ones that have no issues are the macs and linux machines. The windows machines always need hand-holding, clearing of cruft, a/v scanning, spyware checks and so on. Of all my customers 2 came to me with significant problems with their windows networks. After I was done they wondered out loud how I had transformed the reliability of their shops. Easy I said. You are now on Linux. Of the two Linux machines converted I havent had a single support call in a year. They run printers, fileservers, NT domains, backups, RAID, etc etc etc. One got the company aerospace ISO9002 certification. And none cost my customers a dime.

Once they were educated they ceased to be afraid. Once they were a fraid they realised the technology is simply there to allow them to do their work.

Judging by this post the task of education is far from over.

Drivers

"Big problem with Open Source is the peripherals. Printer drivers specifically. To the average user, they need to be able to put a disk in and install the driver. Not so with Linux. Very geeky solutions that may require compiling the driver for your Linux distro."

I'm willing to "nominate" Ubuntu Linux to be "the" supported distribution. If the various distributions do drivers differently, rather than wait for "which is best" let's tell them we need ONE we'll care for - assuming Ubuntu == Debian at the driver level, Debian is Good Enough To Use.

Then tell the manufacturers that if they do not PROVIDE ALTERNATE DRIVERS, YOU WON'T BUY THE PRODUCT. I have an HP 1600 Color Laser printer for which the Ubuntu drivers do fairly as opposed to the Windows drivers which do quite well. I see no reason to accept this state of affairs, insofar as HP could have written a Debian driver for that unit in a week and have had it online for 2 years now, if they gave a damn. We could download it as whatever equates to an RPM from HP and be done.

So make them give a damn. Complain.