The reason I was wrong was the following. IBM is investing something like $1 billion in Linux. Other companies are investing significantly too, mostly in the form of making their apps Linux-compatible (such as Oracle). All of those companies would like to break Microsoft's stranglehold on the world. But they can't take over the desktop as long as their desktop environment is not as good as Microsoft's (or Apple's).

But think of the semiconductor industry's Sematech, which "is a unique endeavor of 12 semiconductor manufacturing companies from seven countries. Located in Austin, Texas, USA..." The key phrase here is "Located in Austin, Texas". They are getting a bunch of people under one roof with funds contributed by 12 large companies to work on technical projects of interest to all the members.

Suppose the companies who are investing heavily in Linux did exactly the same thing. They could put together a team of comparable size to the one working on Mac OS X desktop environment in one location if they chose to, and probably create something as good given enough time. There is no reason the resulting code couldn't be open source.

All the companies would be hardware companies or application companies that want to break Microsoft's monopoly.

This could be done, but probably won't, so Apple is still in a potentially good position. It could become the vendor of the desktop environment for all the GNU-derived Unix clone OS's of the world. Due to things it could do to integrate the desktop environment with its own hardware a little more closely than clone makers could, it would continue being able to sell Macs at least as well as it does today, while getting additional revenues from the people who want to run Linux or another GNU variant but also want to have a great desktop. But it seems like that probably won't happen -- leaving Microsoft to probably continue to be the dominant OS for a long time to come. On the other hand, you never know -- sometimes, against all odds, people do the right thing.
8:33:13 AM