Windows 95 reminds me of an old Eagles song:

Life in the Crash lane
Surely make you lose your mind
Life in the crash lane, everything all the time
Life in the crash lane, uh huh
Blowin' and burnin', blinded by thirst
They didn't see the stop sign,
took a turn for the worse

Windows 95 was a house of cards that wasted thousands of hours of millions of people who lost their work and had to have their computers "repaired" on an ongoing basis. Not fond memories, I tell you.

I switched to Linux in 97, and although there were many other issues, once you got it running, it stayed that way.

Yahoo by making itself technologically dependent on Microsoft for 10 years has given up on search. This effectively puts Yahoo out of business. It's a golden parachute for Yahoo's executives but jeopardizes any chances that Yahoo will ever be able to play in the search business again.

As for Microsoft, it allows microsoft to gain instantly a few percentage points in web search, which should allow them to extract higher ad fees.

Microsoft is patient and they hope that they are buying 10 years with which to figure out how to bring down Google. They have enough money, but when it comes to the web, I think Microsoft is largely irrelevant.

If it wasn't for their desktop monopoly, nobody would even care about anything LIVE. They shove that stuff down users throat every time a user tries to download messenger, which they are only interested in because of the network effects that allowed Messenger to become relevant in the first place. I remember when no one even knew what messenger was and people hated it initially, but it kept popping up after every single XP install and telling people that they needed an account and enough people fell for this crap.

Only another Google-like startup could outgoogle google, but it certainly won't be Microsoft or Microsoft and Yahoo's dead skeleton.

The article's main hypothesis is that piracy negates the price differential between Linux and Windows.

Specifically, one of the hypothesis towards the end of the article is that Microsoft unofficially acquiesced to piracy and maybe even encouraged it. Well, I thought I would point to Bill Gate's own words in the matter. In an article that I originally read on Cnet magazine, but that has since been commented and reprinted everywhere, he actually stated that piracy helps Microsoft by making the OS pervasive and that they were not worried about the Chinese pirating Windows, because if they are going to pirate "something", Microsoft and him would prefer that it be Windows.

"Then a comment made by Microsoft Founder, Chairman, and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates in 1998 and reprinted widely and often in the official media became a lightning rod for criticism of the software giant. Fortune magazine reported that, in a presentation to business students at an American university, Gates said rampant software piracy might turn out to be a positive thing for Microsoft.

"Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software," Gates reportedly said. "Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

Source: http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/02/23/ microsoft.china.idg/

And here's a more recent and yet more poignant articles and quotes from Bill Gates as it specifically mentions Linux.

Sources: http://www.digitaltippingpoint.com/?q=node/103
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_arc hive/2007/07/23/100134488/index.htm
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/ind ustry_sectors/technology/article2098235.ece
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/07/we-love-microso ft-software-piracy-in.html

I think the article would benefit tremendously from including the information above as it strengthens the author's main thesis a great deal.