Re: Lack of "cool"...
"appearance to the general public of enterprise and business focused."
I don't even know if that is the case. Windows was never designed as an enterprise product. It was made into an enterprise product, painfully, through decades of bolt ons. It was originally the system that people used at home in the early 90s, late 80s... then it just spread into enterprise because it was the only game in town and PC, client-server had some flexibility advantages over mainframe or big iron in general.
MSFT now claims that stuff like Windows and Office is uniquely suited to the enterprise (read: Apple and Google are not, according to MSFT). That isn't true though. Enterprises just move slowly. They are always using generation old tech just because it takes them forever to move. No reason a company could not replace MSFT with Apple/Google... they just haven't, in broad scale at least, done so thus far... for no apparent reason other than inertia behind the status quo.
I think this is very much like IBM vs MSFT in the 90s. MSFT was the cool thing that everyone wanted to use in 95. IBM was the status quo for enterprise. People didn't wholesale remove IBM when MSFT became the it thing, but they started moving to MSFT at a glacial pace. Likewise with Google today (and Apple). Google is now the cool thing. It is what everyone uses at home, would like to use at work. MSFT isn't going to be wholesale replaced, but stuff will start moving in the Google/Apple direction more and more... but nothing moves all that fast in the enterprise.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
