Push.

Plus nothing really came along that was a viable alternative to Office. Don't count MS out of tablets yet, Surface falls into line quite well with an Office dominated culture.

Agreed. People love to trash talk Microsoft's mobile offerings, but really their biggest failing was being so late to the game. If I was in the market for a tablet (which I am not, because I am still perfectly satisfied with my 3 year old Android tablet) I would definitely be taking a hard look at the Surface.

Definitely.

The ASUS T100TA is an impressive tablet or mini-laptop based on the new Bay Trail Atoms and will allow many corporate users who are tied to the MS stack to do what they need on a tablet. They run Windows 8, not RT and are start at $350.

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/HandsOn-ASUS-Transformer-Book...

Oh gosh. The battery life alone terrifies me! Microsoft simply doesn't know how to make an efficient OS.

Really? http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/21/microsoft-surface-2-revie...

Many business people depend on outlook and it's integration with exchange. I don't understand it myself, but it's a fact.

What's amazing to me is how popular Linux has become while no one is promoting it. Both MS and Apple have spent loads on marketing and polishing their products. No one is marketing "Linux".

Not entirely true... Oracle and IBM both push Linux, and of course Red Hat and SUSE are both ~1 billion dollar companies.

Not an Oracle user, but aren't they primarily pushing their DBMS and related products, with their RH clone merely a certified platform for the their core products?

Same kinda true of IBM too, no? Except AFAIK, they don't even have a Linux flavor the claim as their own. I think they're clearly a supporter of Linux, but any marketing I've ever heard from them (admittedly not much), was for their own core products.

Red Hat is indeed a commercial company with a Linux distro as its core product, but, while it may be the most successful "Linux" company, isn't it small potatoes compared to AAPL and MSFT? Most non techie people I know probably wouldn't know what Red Hat is, but I suspect all would know Apple and Microsoft.

Because people don't want to "compile kernels" and "make those drivers finally work".