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Originally Posted by brk-lnt
No offense, but you sound very ill-equipped to argue one side or the other in this conversation.
In most product markets the volume leader is NOT the highest quality product, it is the product with the mid-point price.
Microsoft has been steadily losing market share while Apple has been steadily gaining. If you are talking about operating systems, then they are both equal amounts of "proprietary". I'm not sure how you counter that Apple hardware is proprietary, in fact a moderate group of people buy Apple laptops for their higher aesthetics and build quality, and then run Windows on them. Seems like if it was a proprietary platform you wouldn't be able to do that so easily.
The length of time either company has been in existence is also of little real concern. The consumer personal computer business didn't really start in significant volumes until the Internet become popular in the mid-90's, long after both companies had been established.
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I have 17 years experience as certified systems administrator and architect.
Not going to argue best of breed. What I will say however is that anyone who runs a business is not going to use something that does not give them good return on investment. That doesn't mean Microsoft is or ever has been the end all be all solution to everything, but they were successful in reaching a market penetration of 95% on all desktops world wide. Yes now they are loosing some market share to Linux. That's a good thing, healthy competition in the market place will lead to better choices and products for the consumers out there.
What both Linux and Windows provide is an operating system that can run on virtually anything and do it pretty well. With virtualization, SAAS and cloud computing becoming more widely adopted that will result in these two operating systems domination in the marketplace for the foreseeable future.
The days of operating systems that run only on specific hardware platforms are numbered and have been for some time especially for large scale operations mostly due to exorbitant costs of hardware, support and big dollar salaries going to IT guys with the skills to deal with them. Sun Solaris, HP-UX and IBM's AIX will all suffer.
That's the corporate market, consumers are going to buy what they familiar with, comfortable with using and again has an attractive price point. This is why MAC never got any traction or wide adoption comparatively speaking. Not to say that it will not retain a nitch customer base as it will, but it will never equate to a significant percentage of the overall market share. The fact Apple is still around today is not on the success of the MAC, but the portable electronic devices they now produce. Whether that holds or not will depend on how successful the knock offs are, as previously pointed out the droid is outselling the iphone by a 2-1 margin. That is not good news for Apple lovers.
Enough said, this thread was supposed to be for weather... let's stick to that!