Submitted by rich_c on March 4, 2009 - 8:02pm
So apparently, Steve Ballmer told a group of Most Valued Professionals that if they didn't upgrade from Win XP they'd have to face the wrath of their end users demanding to know why they still had to use a 5 year old OS. Meanwhile, in the real world I think it's clear that those same users would probably have more reason to gripe if their desktops were upgraded to the latest MS offering. With the very real possibility of tried and tested applications no longer working and an unfamiliar office suite to deal with, these disgruntled users would be better served by migration to Linux desktops. Their old apps would have at least an equal if not better chance of running under Wine and OpenOffice.org would seem comfortingly familiar compared to the newest versions of MS Office. Additionally, there's the easing of the burden on their company's IT budget as whatever Linux they choose it certainly won't require the latest and greatest hardware to perform well. 'Refreshing' the existing hardware with a new OS would failry certainly suffice... To me, this makes the recent patent claim by MS against TomTom seem very much like a wounded animal lashing out in desparation.
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