That, I assume, has nothing to do with all OEMs bundling Win7 with the computers they sell (and Win7 having no provision to be downgraded to XP like Vista had).

When OEMs tie their products to Win7, it's expected record hardware sales will translate precisely to "software success".

I think every PC around me (about 40 in this floor) counts as a Win7 sale. Two of them run Windows.

> Almost entirely supplanting XP?

Can people still buy computers capable of running XP without extensive tweaking? Last time I saw someone installing XP on a modern, post-Vista, PC the process included downloading stuff into usb drives so that the PC could use the network.

Windows 7 sells because Dell, HP and Acer sell and the machines that were in service running XP had to break some day. Normal people use whatever their computers come with and almost nobody buys boxed Windows. Vista was an exception - it was so bad people preferred using XP, even if installing it took a whole day of boots and downloads. When OEMs start to integrate 8 into their boxes you'll see 8's adoption match OEM shipments very closely. Microsoft even declared Vista was very successful based on that kind of number.

> FWIW I am typing this in Firefox on Redhat.

I don't see what effect this has on your reasoning. You won't be "more right" because you don't use Windows.

How wide would that adoption be if not for bundled sales?

Competing with 'free' is only hard once the cost is broken out and made visible.

I was personally responsible for the purchase of 3 windows licenses last year, but I didn't use any of them. The Microsoft tax makes it seem as though things are better than they really are, it's only a couple of percent but it does make a difference and I think that percentage would be higher if people had to pay the full list price for their windows licenses.

The problem for them is that their core markets, the desktop and the non-web server, are becoming less and less relevant in comparison to mobile and web-based technologies. When people say the PC is dead, it's not that the desktop computer is dead - the form factor will continue to be popular - it's the local OS + applications + data model that was made popular with the 8-bit computers of the late 70's is losing space to a model where your apps and data reside on servers accessible through the internet using a wide assortment of different devices.

If Windows 8 becomes a big hit, then, perhaps, Microsoft will survive long enough to completely switch its own model of selling software licenses to selling hosted services and the attention of its users through their app store model. In any case, it will be a very different Microsoft than the one that sold me the FORTRAN/77 compiler I used in college.

Yes,

Just like RIM and Nokia were tremendously success within their markets as these markets were once defined.

The crazy or impressive or disturbing thing about the present management/investment environment is that these successful companies panic and do a 180 turn based on a whiff that their markets are going change fundamentally, often killing themselves before anyone else kills them - look at Netflix.