I agree with Jimbo on the pricing, Yeah, it will be a downward slide for MS if they ever go that route.
I will definitely jump ship for Ubuntu to start, simply for the their Phone adventure, which I am already going to keep an eye on.
It is far too intriguing to not keep a watch on and take a serious look at. I am not MS loyal to my own detriment.
Plenty of things I don't like about MS, but I would like to see a nice cross platform system be put in place.
And the fact Ubuntu and possibly other Linux distros if Ubuntu pulls this off, we could see a whole new paradigm in OS's.
MS very well could be in trouble on the consumer side of things. And I say that only IF Ubuntu can pull off a real cross platform system.
Ubuntu, while still not perfectly suited for all people will start looking better and better to promote and teach to all, by those of us in the know.
BTW, just downloaded Ubuntu 12.10 and will load it in a VM to play with, it's been a while.
It is amazing how Ubuntu 12.10 is, I downloaded it on a test machine running windows 7 pro. I used their windows installer to do it and it took 18gigs of the HD and Partitioned it so now I have a dual boot for both.
the whole process took 15 minutes
I wanted to test it for a client who wants to put it on his old XP Machines, as the main OS. These machines are used in a community center and right now they cannot afford to put new ones in so wiping XP will get rid of all the junk and make the machines look almost new at least for another year until they can purchase new ones.
I was amazed by it. It looks similar to Windows OS, now it has a software updater manager so you do not have to use DOS commands to do an update on a program. The last time I installed and used Linux was about 10 years ago.
I am really impressed with the Ubuntu 12.10. Libre Office is installed in it and so is Firefox. I installed Dropbox on it and it was quite easy to do
I can see if this keeps improving more and more users will go to it since you do not need security on it and it is not hard to learn