Re: "worth the extra security risk they inherently present"
"Like all businesses with captive markets, they're primarily interested in their balance sheets."
But is that market capture guaranteed? It consists largely of businesses that have their own bottom line to tend to. How much more intrusion into their affairs will it take for those customers to start to review the market? Anyone not firmly wedded to Windowsland knows very well that other desktop environments can be re-skinned to like more or less any version of Windows that takes your fancy. It's quite easy to envisage a PC vendor pre-installing Linux or BSD with a first run menu for a new user which offers a choice of any Windows UI from W2K to present.
In this context the spoiler of "It doesn't run my gamez" won't get far; this is a work machine. The other spoiler, the user with a massive investment in Excel macros, might end up finding themselves the corporate odd man out, just like the user who must have a Mac. There might even be a market in tools to convert those spreadsheets into one-off applications.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
