Re: you have to make your mind about it.
"I have to wonder what would happen if MicroSoft just bowed down, adopted Linux as the OS, and focused on Office for it's profit margin?? Would they gain??"
Well, lets take a similar case. Apple adopted that strategy with BSD for its iDevices and dropped having its own proprietary MacOS. It is now at record profitability partly due to having outsourced the lower (and expensive to maintain) levels of the operating system to the greater open source community (and it does contribute some back to). The bowels of the OS don't generate profitability/value for stockholders, and really doesn't differentiate you like the API's and UI on top of the OS do, so why maintain that crap yourself? Given the current CEO Nadella who is very cloud and post PC era focused, I think MS will follow Apple and convert to BSD underneath to lower their overall development costs.
(and no, I'm not an Apple fan, but credit where credit is due, buying NeXT from Jobs and basing the "NeXTgen" Mac OSX on it was a stroke of genius)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
