It is an article of faith among anti-capitalists that Microsoft is an unassailable juggernaut that is immune to market forces. My assessment, of course, is that unless they harness the government to crush their competitors (which is precisely what Microsoft's competitors have attempted to do to Microsoft) that the free market always works.

An interesting new factor in this is a bit of news that I heard about Apple's OS X, which is basically a form of Unix in a fuzzy bunny suit. Apparently the Unix kernel is perfectly happy running on Intel processors, which is interesting in itself, but there is also a rumor that a strike team at Apple has been tasked with keeping OS X running actively on Intel PCs, and has been steadily tracking all the upgrades and software interfaces right in parallel with the Apple-based operating system.

I will be interested in when they pull THIS fuzzy bunny out of the hat. Whether anyone would buy OS X on a cheaper PC remains to be seen, and whether Apple thinks they could sell enough software to make up for loss of hardware sales also remains to be seen. I'm not enough of a computer geek to make a call. But it should be fun.