Interesting read which brings me to another point. Outside of deployment on new PCs (inertia), how does their business model even work? The numbers I've heard on development cost ($6B to $10B) and the implication that not many (relatively speaking) copies will be sold for upgrades, etc, why did they even bother? The new Office suite runs fine on XP (supposedly) but I can't see even that upgrade being worth it even for power users of Office.

We probably have 400 PCs in our company (over which I have some influence on software) that do nothing more than check emails, light word processing and light spreadsheet use, it makes you wonder why we have a copy of Office running on all of them.

My relatively short exposure to Ubuntu has been mostly pleasant with the exception of connectivity within a Windows network environment (sharing on the Linux box is more complicated than seems to be necessary). The UI is simple enough with enough in common with the "Windows" experience for any reasonable user to transition pain free. We (obviously) don't run games and most people don't run specialized software such as AutoCad or some of our even more specialized software such as GIS or modelling programs.