I don't think pissing off their hardware vendors is really that big a deal. There is an echo chamber in HN towards unix in both Linux and Apple forms - your grandparents still expect to talk into Best Buy and buy something with Windows on it, because it runs their ISPs POS pop3 email app, or they have all their pictures in some proprietary picture catalog program and don't know how to take them out of it.

I guess the more alarming trend is how a lot of tech companies and governments are picking up LTS Ubuntu as a replacement for Windows XP workstations they have had for 10+ years.

> I guess the more alarming trend is how a lot of tech companies and governments are picking up LTS Ubuntu as a replacement for Windows XP workstations they have had for 10+ years.

I have friends who work in the systems integration space and from their experience they don't see an evidence of this. Was there a number reported anywhere that makes you say this?

The German government and Amazon mainly. Germany has been phasing out at various levels of bureaucracy XP for Ubuntu, and Amazon uses it a lot now.

ummm didn't they abandon that and moved back to Windows finally? http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/german-open-source-exper...

Don't know about Amazon but its just a small software company that is known to be stingy to its own people

>Amazon >small

You're kidding me, right?

In this context? No. PC sales per year a few hundred million. Amazon total headcount 100K (including warehouse workers)

In case you didn't bother to read the parent comment, the user was referring to Amazon forcing its users to install Linux instead of Windows.

Windows is only a quarter of MSFT's income. Not insignificant by any definition, but not bread and butter either...