The world wide financial mess has created an opportunity.
Walk into any Fortune 100 company and you'll find hundreds (if not thousands) of underpowered PC's, embedded workstations and servers, most of them still powered by Microsoft Operating Systems.
Many, believe it or not, are still running Windows 2000. The upgrade path was delayed numerous times for financial reasons.
Pent-up demand to upgrade hardware is not only here, but it's becoming a necessity.
Most embedded systems (and there are lots of them) can't be changed dramatically via software.
Cloud computing is still a tough sell and probably will be for some uses ... for some time.
While Windows 7 may help some companies save a few bucks in the IT department (it's much better at fixing things itself and networking), workstations still need an upgrade to keep pace with the next chapter of the interconnected company.
The opportunity is in the operating system of these devices and in today's world, the formula becomes fairly simple.
The company that delivers a package that works well, covers the bases, and delivers what is needed will win.
Will it be Mac OS X? Windows 7? .. a magical new front-end for Linux? ... or ... something we haven't even read about yet?
We never really know do we.
Happy New Year all
Charlie
edited for content Jan 3, 2009 10:30 pm et