But By moving away from Microsoft, you will end up making Microsoft More Powerful.

Why? It's simple competition and gross economics. And it has happened before.

In 1996 as the Mac OS 7.X was at it's peak and OS 8.X was soon to be released, Microsoft found that it was slipping behind in the OS race, so they started fixing Win95, and in 2 and a half years, Windows 98 came out, blowing away the mac OS 8.X series, infact As the OS 10X came out, it just couldn't compete with Windows 2000.

If everyone starts making the move away from Windows to Linux and other OS's, and the Computer industry Giant's position is japordized, Microsoft can, have, and will make the push to be better than it's competitors. There will always be other OS's to compete with Microsoft, but becasue of the Global scale and wide range of Microsoft users, only about 15 million of most adept users will take the move away from Microsoft, where as the other 500 million microsoft users will stay on the boat. (these numbers are generalized) So unless a VERY large group of people switch from Microsoft, I do't think Microsoft will do much, unless they get caught up in another scandal. :?