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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

The fear of Linux took them at last.

Not even that. The fear of unpatched XP! If they can get all those unlicensed XP users to upgrade, it will be a huge win for everybody.

Microsoft wins because the albatross of XP will be off their PR necks. Every unpatched security hole will still look bad, even if they gave people years of warning.

Users win because (hopefully) they are using a better OS.

That's not going to help. Many Windows users don't upgrade not because they fear the price of Windows 8, but because they can't stand it and prefer XP, as simple as that. The only way MS can actually help them is not by making Windows 8 free (as in beer), but for example by open sourcing XP. They might do that when they'll get really desperate, but I don't think they are there yet.

> That's not going to help. Many Windows users don't upgrade not because they fear the price of Windows 8, but because they can't stand it and prefer XP, as simple as that.

Or they don't want to bother with buying new hardware. A friend of mine is still using her 10-year old laptop with 1GB memory and XP. And it works just fine for her purposes (web browsing, gmail, little office).

If by Linux you mean iPads and Chromebooks.

No, I mean regular Linux. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7338814

Let's look at the numbers.

Excluding post-PC products, classic desktop and laptop OS market share is:

Windows - 90.8% OS X - 7.7% Linux - 1.5%

Linux has a long way to go.

Numbers aren't enough. Dynamics matter even more. Obviously MS isn't scared of current numbers but scared of where things are moving.

I would say moreover the fear of Google.

Google doesn't compete with them for the desktop really. But desktop Linux distros do. Especially when it comes to gaming. Note that Valve pushes Linux a lot lately with their whole SteamOS effort especially. I think that's a major threat for MS who for a long time enjoyed an unchallenged position as a platform in PC gaming.

Latest Linux gaming renaissance eats at their confidence. For many gamers Windows is not seen as a requirement anymore, and they simply ditch it and start using better systems (especially because Wine became so good lately). While gamers are a minority amongst Windows users, MS still fears that dynamic because it breaks their network effect and creates the same effect in the Linux world.

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