[quote author=“Zeke”]What I was thinking of in designing the poll was copies of the OS in use, on all devices that can be said to use an OS, worldwide. Note that the question is when will MS become a minority OS, not when will OS X overtake it, or even when OS X will become dominant.
I believe that there will be paradigm shifts in the future, as there have been every few years in the past, that will eventually kill MS’s DOS based OS. Ten years ago a 1 GB hard drive was a large drive. Now it is useless. Why? Because file sizes have gotten much larger. Why? Because network speeds have increased. Similar changes will happen in the future and sooner or later the foundation upon which Windows and Vista are built will become inadequate to do the job. In that event the MS OS dominance will disappear as fast as the 20 MB hard drive in the age of the 500 MB porn video file.
Wow! You remember 20 MB hard drives!
I remember installing those back in 1989 and thinking everyone now had storage room to spare!
Obviously M$ is in a bind with its antiquated OS and may be fast approaching where Apple was positioned with an aging OS core that required so many patches and added layers in order to accommodate demands for enhanced functionality. Apple chose the make a break with the past and develop a new OS.
I marvel at the fact I am typing this on a 5 year-old PowerBook that is running Leopard without an apparent performance hit.
Unless M$ breaks with the past and chooses to develop a new core without concerns for backward compatibility the Windows franchise will spiral toward irrelevance. We are seeing that already happen.