http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/Computers/Linux/Manifesto.txt
It's taken longer than he expected...
--- snip --- WINE (the Linux emulator for Windows) works to a fairly surprising degree. You can run real Windows programs with it, but some of them don't look right, and some of them just crash. But it has been making big progress in the last year, and now you can actually run Word for Windows. It doesn't work for everybody and there are known bugs, but it's almost becoming usable. I doubt people will wake up and say, "Hey, let's get rid of the shackles of Microsoft and switch to Linux and WINE." But there are going to be more and more people who discover they really want the networking abilities of Linux, or who run a web server on it. WINE slowly expands the group of people who would find Linux or some other operating system acceptable because they really don't care about Microsoft per se; they care about a few programs.
In a few years WINE will be good enough that you can actually consider running Linux instead of Windows. It won't take over 100% of the market, but that's OK, too, because when you don't have one major entity that owns most of the market, it's a much saner, competitive environment. I think that'll happen, regardless of Linux. --- snip ---
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Dan Kegel