I feel like there's a cyclical gridlock between businesses and business software vendors in which neither party can afford to be the "first" to move to a new platform.

It's like a comical game of chicken because in less than a decade all of this software is going to be in a web browser anyway.

> It's like a comical game of chicken because in less than a decade all of this software is going to be in a web browser anyway.

Will it, though? On the surface it stands to reason, but I distinctly recall seeing this exact argument a lot back in mid-00s already, during all the initial RoR craze. And yet, here we are.

It might just be my own personal experience, but the business tools I'm using today are very different from those of the mid-00s. We weren't using salesforce or google docs or even webmail-for-business back then.

I think with the rise of cloud based productivity software (Google Docs, etc.) we'll see a rise in alternative OS's.

I know one of the big issues with adopting Linux on the desktop in companies is the issue with access control (something like AD's Group Policy). It's amazing how you can control pretty much every permission/policy imaginable within your domain using AD, and until something like that comes out for Linux it won't get adopted.

The sad part here is that Linux is actually really good for that by design (if you take the time to understand Unix permissions).

That's true, we use Red Hat's IDM and it's very nice.

The sad thing is that MS office is about more than editing documents these days. Thanks to embedded VB scripts etc the suite is more a RAD environment for office drones. There is an untold number of business processes that are effectively encoded into a excel spreadsheet sprinkled with scripts.

Chromebooks are having quite a success already (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Sales_and_marketing). I've seen many people say they were happy to use a Chromebook for their current use instead of trying to fix/upggrade their old Windows computer as well.

The risk that ads will appear on Chromebooks is quite high though.

When Google can push an ad on every search page, is there a need for ads in the OS itself? Microsoft pushes ads into the start menu (and other places) because it doesn't have anywhere near that kind of search traffic.

Certainly, The Enterprise - if that means the enormous multinational companies at the very top - will be the last to switch since they are change-averse and such a change would be extremely disruptive. But SMEs and new companies are undoubtedly using non-Windows desktops more and more. Anecdotally, the 15-person 5yo company I work for uses chromebooks, mac laptops, a mac desktop and, possibly, one or two pc laptops (not 100% sure).

Change-averse is putting it extremely mildly. You understand the IMMENSE amount of software required to run on Windows. Just Office alone is not going to change for any corporation. It's really just not worth it at all.

Well, I didn't want to be TOO rude ;-) I realise that there are a lot of huge companies that have tied themselves into Windows. I'm just pointing out that the trend I've observed, at least here in the U.K., is for new companies (which will one day become the behemoths) to use a variety of clients, either running cross-platform apps or webapps. Our company went from a mac shop to a chromebook one practically overnight. There might still be some barriers there, for some companies, but far less so today than 10 years ago.