[1] Simon makes a striking observation about 'pain points' which kinda assumes that people will stick to what they have unless it starts hurting. (Agreed: standards compliancy will only interest the odd geek.) However this starting-point kinda hides the intrinsic values and innovation these alternatives are showing today. I'm quite sure that I wasn't the first and only immediate switcher after seeing tabbed browsing. And how many OOo users out there just started off by looking for an easy way to export to PDF?

Still, Simon's starting point is probably the correct one: nobody is likely to go out and wonder about alternatives unless they're missing something. The big thing to catalyze that IMHO is having the large website building community go for more strict standard compliant websites (with png's usinig transparency)

[2] I agree that OSS != linux, but in this story I think it makes Simon overlook another one of today's pain points: "passive virus-infection" I've recently seen two occasions of freshly installed XP machines hooked up (i.e. passively there, no surfin' or mail-attachment opening) to the net just to get virus-infected within less then 20 minutes...

Given this, I'm left to wonder who but those (masses?) that don't notice or care are left to enjoy their net experience from an WinXP that is *not* behind some port-blocking gateway (which is running some embedded linux?)

I think the pain on the desktop is getting painful enough to raise the number of people considering a switch in medicine here. Again, I'm positive that people who do switch will probably find some unexpected innovation in the ready alternatives out there: Mac-OSX keeps on gathering raving users (see: it doesn't need to be oss), and I'm still actively enjoying my ubuntu linux distro.