> 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.