[Wayne Luke]

Microsoft has a lot of competition... Solaris, OSX, a number of Unix variants, ten trillion Linux variants. Whether any of them are successful competition is in the eye of the beholder. One could say that OSX is successful albeit crippled by the hardware bundling requirement. Linux might be considered successful if there were maybe 10 variants instead of ten trillion. Its stifled by the overwhelming choice presented to the consumer.

However Google seems to think we need another Linux variant bouncing around. Maybe they can popularize it where IBM, Netware, Oracle and Sun have not been able to in the past. Google's past software offerings don't seem to support that idea but we'll see. Of course, they'll need an equivalent to DirectX and the ability to put billions of dollars into the gaming industry to make a truly successful OS. Currently no one (that matters) makes Linux based games because there is no profit for their cost. Keep in mind that DirectX is much more than graphics. Yeah OpenGL exists to compete on the graphics level but there is no unifying architecture for all that DirectX provides including sound, input control, floating point processing, and more unified over thousands of devices.

Like it or not, games sell computers to consumers.