Quote Originally Posted by bipper
I disagree. The main reason windows leads is because they are a cheap, ankle biting corperate mafia of a company. For those of you who claim they are smart buisness, read up on business law. The political underdogging and buy outs are amazingly shadey.
It is true that they are shadey and there is political underdogging, I'll give you that. But I stand by what I said as I work in the business of providing support to other large businesses and what I stated is pretty well known around here.
I can run nearly any windows app on a llinux box (some require some work, but we are talking non native code), and/or find software that can do the same.
I'm not talking about Adobe Acrobat or even random stuff you can download from the internet. I'm talking about company-specific software. That is, software that is built and designed for a company. For example, you wouldn't really know what SAX/CCSRV01 or SANDB601 is because these are programs that are designed for use within Computacenter. Likewise when at Royal Bank of Scotland they had their own systems and so do many other companies, particularly the large and/or wealthy ones (banks, lawyer firms, oil companies, governments). People aren't aware of the programs they use unless they work for those companies. The thing about such programs is that companies are incredibly unwilling to write new programs from scratch and many only do operate with Windows. Does Microsoft care about making an operating system that is compatible with the Royal Bank or Computacenter's systems? Yes, considering the worth of these companies in the industry. Of course they do. Royal Bank is the 7th largest bank in the world and Computacenter is a leader in European IT with massive influence on many other large and/or wealthy companies as mentioned before. Microsoft has been successful in assuring companies that they can continue to upgrade their MS Windows operating systems without having to rewrite their programs - something they would have to do if they were to move to Linux.
Buisnesses look at tech support, and the ease of implimentation, as well as a few other collectivly insignigicant features when ever they select anything from computers to health insurance companies. Windows happens to have the best packaging, and a hint of speed at the cost of stability and redundancy.
That is also a large impact, the tech support etc, yes. But even if Linux had an easy to implement system with a large tech support (which they would have to pay for, regardless of using Linux, I'm sure we're all aware of this), the other companies for the most part would still need to rewrite their company-specific programs and that kind of thing takes years to perfect. Trust me - I've been waiting for an upgraded version of the company-specific software they use over here for some time. The programs I regularly use - SAX & 601 - are incredibly dated. They started working on something to replace them at least two years ago. Probably longer. But then again, the scale of the program which will replace them is supposedly going to be incredible so I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

EDIT: Having said all that, unless you use your home PC for said company specific software, I do think that if you know how to use Linux and you don't use programs and/or video games that require Windows in order to run then you should probably use Linux at home. But having said that, I'm not currently eager to install or learn how to use Linux until I have a completely seperate box. I've only ever had to reinstall Windows once - when my hard drive failed.