“In the past times that they’ve made this jump, they haven’t had a viable alternative. Linux wasn’t ready for the home or office. No large corporations had made the move to open source. But things are slightly different now because there are large corporations and banks that have made the move so the IT executive will not feel like they’re right on the bleeding edge.

“The other thing is that I’m not quite sure that Vista is going to be as easy a rock to go across as Microsoft says it is. It will be the first time that they are going to have a true 64-bit operating system out there. Unless they’re very careful, they may have problems with device drivers and binary compatibility they didn’t have with the last couple of 32 bit jumps. Linux has been a 64-bit system since 1995 and it can run 32-bit applications so we’ve had a number of years of getting the system stable in a 64-bit environment that quite frankly Microsoft hasn’t had.”

Can Microsoft successfully make the transition from selling software products to a software services model? Not according to Hall

“The model is now services and not products and Microsoft sells products, so they have a big problem. They have a whole VAR and reseller chain set up to sell products. Now all of a sudden they sell services in order to be viable. They can either sell the services over the net or they could develop a services arm that goes out into the field. In any case, however, they would then be competing with all the rest of the service vendors. So, they would have to develop a service strategy and service channel to be able to do that and continue to bring in money.”

According to Hall, however, service strategy or not, Microsoft will have difficulty keeping the good times rolling.

“The other problem that Microsoft has is that I don’t think there’s anything on earth that has as high of a mark-up as proprietary software products. And particularly in a product where you have as large a market as Microsoft has. Let’s face it, there’s a reason why Bill is worth $80 billion or whatever. If people think that the oil barons are raking in money hand over fist, then they haven’t been paying much attention to Microsoft. When you go into the free open source space and you start to try to make that much profit with your software, you find that somebody else comes in and says hey I can do the same thing for a fraction of the cost.”

As far as Jon “Maddog” Hall is concerned, the time frame for when there will be a shift en masse to open source is open ended. However, he believes that Microsoft’s new Vista release could be a possibility.

“I think that Vista is an opportunity for people because they are going to have to make a decision. If they are smart, they will look at both camps very well and very hard. They will do the necessary work to figure this out and they will make their decision. A lot of kids in school and college are learning about free software and they’re saying sure I’ll use Microsoft for games but I can get a copy of Linux and Open Office for free, so why should I buy Vista and Office 12?”

If what Jon "maddog" Hall says is true, we live in interesting times indeed.