My profiles:
"From book sales, of course, we know that OS X is considerably hotter than Windows XP."
I usually dig what O'Reilly is writing, but here he should drop the crack pipe. Book sales reveal trends about books, and maybe the economy at large, but not operating systems. Case in point, after all these years, and billions of metric tons of books about Linux, this OS amounts to exactly 0% market share on the desktop, as independently demonstrated by the referrer logs of about every web site (I'd love to see Slashdot stats just for fun). Unless, by "hotter operating system," Tim meant "OS that failed to translate buzz into sales, because people weren't impressed with what they saw," and now that makes a lot more sense.
I run Windows XP Pro on our two computers, and never did I feel the need to buy a book about it, yet I find it's an excellent operating system. If you want to know about the hottest OS, you'd better check... operating system sales. For all the "switch" brouhaha, Apple isn't going anywhere but sideways (ok, they're doing fine in the notebook market). People anticipate Jaguar because everyone acknowledges OS X is sluggish. Apple is just borrowing from Microsoft's book and selling a bunch of patches as an upgrade.
Tim adds he's been doing a little research and checked Dell's sales for comparison. Hello, this isn't the Benevolent Dictatorship of Closed Overpriced Underperforming Hardware here, this is about the open PC market driven by Microsoft standards [*] such as DirectX. Brand names à la Dell or HP are a minority, versus no-name assemblers and self-built PCs. Successful component suppliers, from Nvidia (a company much more profitable than Apple), to ATI (recently back in the black), to various Taiwanese manufacturers, keep growing, thank you. And I don't need any PC brand to innovate its way on me by, say, putting Firewire ports in their machines, because the day I want Firewire, I buy a $50 PCI card and get it working in my PC in about 4 minutes. Just because there's no PC brand to tell you how great it is doesn't mean you can't do it. Think different, think for yourself.
It's been very easy to answer to Apple fanatics for the last decade: the marketplace has spoken. It only infuriates them more: "the majority is clueless, studies show we're more clever, Microsoft is a monopoly, blah blah blah." Keep going, laughing is good for health.
[*] Whether these standards are "open" or not, I care not as a customer, since they fulfill their mission to increase competition and rise price/performance value. What I need is device drivers and applications, and that's what the Windows platform excels at getting. There was a lot that I didn't like when I worked there, yet for all their ills and wrongdoings, Microsoft has nonetheless been delivering more choice and diversity in the desktop marketplace than all the other competing platforms combined in the last ten years.
Update: speaking of Microsoft, some people who should know better should really stop spouting nonsense about licensing programs, and take Gartner claims with a grain of salt. Yes, corporate customers are dragging their feet (that's why Software Assurance has been "in transition" for about a year), because they don't want to commit, and what's going on is plainly called a price negotiation. But there's no god-given right for cheaper software upgrades, it's just a commercial practice. If you don't understand that and are sent as a sales rep to pitch customers, they'll eat you alive and you'll end up paying them to use your software. Besides, Microsoft typically accounts for less than 10% of a corporation's IT budget (a lot less in larger enterprises), so that's a tempest in a tea cup.
Monopoly? Competitors to Office are not even able to win back accounts by giving away the product. Hint: these products are crapware, while a lot of people actually get their jobs done with MS Office. And the OS is not what's at stake here since corporations mainly acquire it through OEM licenses with their PCs (and rarely update it within the life of the PC.) The only monopoly Microsoft has is in clumsy competitors: Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, Corel, Netscape, AOL, with enemies like this, who needs friends?
The real issue raised in the CNet article is the lack of visibility into what you'll really get with Software Assurance (or Enterprise Agreements, for that matter.) It's really a leap of faith, and Microsoft is notoriously better at making you dream about what's coming, rather than shipping it on time. The other question is, how often do you upgrade. Annuity and software maintenance programs are worthwhile only if you do upgrade at almost each new release.
Wow, seems I'm in the mood for making friends with influential people today. Whatever.
07/31/02 update: still, things are far from rosy in the PC market, if you look at NVidia's latest numbers.