At Long Last, an Answer to Microsoft on the Desktop for the Uninitiated

Okay by now it is apparently obvious that Apple will never replace Microsoft's share on the desktop because of their proprietary hardware agreements. There are illegitimate solutions, like Pystar, but no serious push to allow anything other than the hardware that Apple gives that OK for to run OS. In doing so Apple created a very strong brand because something other than the look and feel of the OS but the hardware as well gave Mac a somewhat, transcendental experience that worked for some but not so much for more sophisticated users that were trying to implement a platform on the cheap.

Windows provided that experience by creating a platform that pretty much worked on whatever hardware you wanted to, so you could slum it out a bit. Yet Windows is still for the most part expensive software and is often bloated so you still need expensive hardware to get around efficiently, so no, still not a viable solution. So now here comes Sun with OpenSolaris, and critics seem to think that Sun should have gotten behind Linux, like everyone else has, but no, uh uh.

The smartest thing Sun ever could have done was to avoid getting behind the Open Source product, like everyone else in information technology had digressed towards doing, and offer their own product.

Who cares if big corporations are behind an open source product. When I run Ubuntu or Fedora yeah I know large corporations are behind them and I may or may not have to pay for support. I definitely have to pay for support for Red Hat's enterprise product, and that is okay, because I would much rather an IT department actually pay for someone well trained on how to help them than to be searching and pecking around Google looking for help.