The Future of Microsoft?

Steve G. has an interesting post about Mac, MS, Linux, and what the future holds for Bill Gates. He's a bit more skeptical about the future of Linux than I, however. I think that there's a huge undercurrent for Linux, but not in the west. Where you'll see a big move towards linux is in the developing world - Brazil, India, and China all want to give their schoolchildren cheap computers, and how else will they do it if not on Linux?

But let's look at the state of things for Microsoft today:
-Firefox is still growing fast, eating away at IE's dominance of the net. But this hardly matters, as MS gives IE away. Thunderbird hasn't had the same success, but it's so ridiculously better than Outlook, and more secure, I can't imagine it won't have the same growth.
-OpenOffice 2.0 is getting great reviews. I've been using OpenOffice for a while now, and thought it was great. It looks like they've cleaned up a lot of the small, irritating problems in 2.0, so I can't wait to try it out. Steve says that when somebody finds a way to challenge MS in the applications game, then Gates has to worry.

We aren't quite there yet - Thunderbird and OpenOffice especially have their small problems - but for most people, the day when we can run an MS-free box is not far off. Hallelujah. On that note, at some point over the summer, I'm going to try switching to Linux. I figure most of my computer time is spent on the net or word processing, and I have a spare hard drive (actually, two) so aside from games, I should be able to run my computer more-or-less Gates-free. Wish me luck!