Writes Red Herring: "From his paper-infested office at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, where he is a senior scientist and head of the distributed systems lab, Ian Foster champions grid technology. Today, he says, grids are where the Web was in 1991 or 1992--more academic curiosity than commercial venture. But, just as the Internet grew from a collection of small academic networks to a humongous octopus spreading its tentacles around the world, Mr. Foster predicts today's minigrids will grow into a huge global grid, a transcontinental processing pool engaged in all sorts of complex tasks, like designing and testing semiconductors and decoding the human genome. Applications like customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) will be run from such a network. Tasks will be broken down, distributed to millions of connected processors, and then the reassembled results would be sent back to a single desktop. Just as the Web produced thousands of business opportunities, a global grid will create and transform a slew of industries, from data processing to storage management."

Steve Ballmer is Microsoft's CE0. He speaks about Linux in an interview with News.com:

We have a built-in application server that's well integrated; there is no such comparable notion in the Linux server. We have a directory server built in; there is no such comparable thing in Linux. The Linux client hardly runs any applications, except a bunch of shareware stuff that's not very good.

There has yet to be any innovation, new features or new capabilities out of the Linux platform.
I think it's not complete, it's a poor value proposition vs. Windows. It is a clone of an operating system. There has yet to be any innovation, new features or new capabilities out of the Linux platform. First they cloned Unix, and there are people working on cloning some of our stuff. But it's just a cloning operating system. That doesn't mean we can stand still--we have to push along. But I don't think anyone should expect anything innovative coming out of that world. There's no data to support that.

Microsoft and Ballmer are making a mistake. Its a typical "Innovator's Dilemma". Linux is sneaking up from below...it is getting batter. Microsoft's Windows and Office are in overshoot. Its a great opportunity for Linux on the desktop - if Linux is focused on new markets and new users. The Linux desktop is now more than good enough.