How well will Linux eat into Microsofts market share for desktop operating systems?
We think it’s unlikely Linux will eat into it, with the current view of what (PC) clients are. But that is going to continue to evolve as well. If you think of the business client of the future, it’s going to look much more like a portal with back-end functionality driven off a server somewhere. In that space, open source may well be a very viable alternative. But we don’t see Linux running on every 8-year-old’s computer. Do you see the end of the split between the KDE and the Gnome desktop software projects in the next three years? I would certainly hope so. One of two things will happen. They will figure out a better way to interoperate, or one of the two will pull away and become the winner. The ecosystem is large enough to support two development teams but not large enough to support two uninteroperable solutions. Do think that will be bridged in the next three years? I think the market will require it. Either there will be a winner or they’ll become interoperable. Will IBM produce
