[jasonlbaptiste]

I was thinking about this the other day. There's a lot of opportunity in terms of other Operating Systems/Interfaces. Computers used to JUST be these beige boxes that sat under our desks. Actually at one point, it used to be huge mainframes. Now, computers are everywhere, and by computers I mean full fledged system specific GUIs tied to some piece of hardware. They're in our pocket, in our cars, on our desks, in our laps, on our tvs, in the cloud as servers, and probably other places I'm not naming. This is where I see other Operating Systems taking away Microsoft's dinner. Microsoft got us to the first billion, but I'm pretty sure someone else will get us to the first trillion. Now, that's pretty exciting.

As far as the desktop goes? Apple will have its market share, which is the high end computing market (they have ~90% of it that 10%) and windows will have the other 90%. You can make Ubuntu function/look exactly like windows/mac. The problem comes down to the OEMs. Will they support it? Will they make the strong push in marketing to get people to try it out? Your grandmother is not going to do sudo and apt-get commands. If an OEM made beautiful machines, that ran tight software/hardware integration running a customized version of Ubuntu, marketed the hell out of it, and offered the right amount of training like Apple does, it could possibly get off the ground. Even then, linux is a scary place for the average person and the apps just aren't there.

Honestly, I'm more bullish on other Operating Systems taking us from billions to trillions on devices that aren't beige boxes that sit under our desk.