This tired, false Microsoft / Linux dichotomy completely misses the point. Microsoft's customers are computer users. Linux doesn't really have "customers" in an

This tired, false Microsoft / Linux dichotomy completely misses the point. Microsoft's customers are computer users. Linux doesn't really have "customers" in any normal sense of the word, but if it did, they would be developers, and the product that Linux provides is a platform that can be molded. Whether or not the unruly horde of Linux developers will ever produce something as polished as Microsoft remains to be seen, but your argument against Linux is a bit like saying Wikipedia will never overtake Britannica because people want to _read_ an encyclopedia, they don't want to _write_ one (duh!)