It’s that grip on the server room that keeps Microsoft’s tenuous grasp of the desktop alive, OEM monopoly notwithstanding. Without it, the Windows tax would just be written off and new machines imaged with a linux distro or similar system.

Around the time that Microsoft was engaged in false advertising against Novell, the M$ execs had a marketing gimmick along the lines of junkets dressed as training “courses” where the theme was how to steam-roll the IT department. Their ideology uber alles, damn the inconvenient things like facts, benchmarks and reviews. Notice that benchmarks, comparisons and evaluations have been all but banned by M$ for its products.

Don’t most countries have policies on how to deal with those driven maniacs that drive through their ideology, destroying large parts of the economy? If some pud-pulling MSCE throws a rock through the ER window, he gets a jail or a fine. If the same pud-pulling MSCE manages to get Windows on the desktops in the same hospital, the lost productivity and costs are many orders of magnitude larger. Shouldn’t the law’s response be larger as well?