celgins - 12:39 am on Dec 28, 2012 (gmt 0)

A few months ago, my brother was having difficulty with IE and decided to download/install FF and Chrome to see which one would work better. As many have already mentioned, most home users are tied to the browsers, and if the browser works as expected, they could care less if it's IE, FF, Opera or Chrome.

In that respect, Microsoft, IE, Windows (aside from the server platform), will continue to lose its identity. But I don't think this is the end of Microsoft. I just think they have to look at reinventing themselves--as all business must do from time to time.

Besides, it may be a while before corporations and the U.S. federal government release their grip on enterprise Microsoft products.

@BaseballGuy: I was recently in the exact same situation. I wanted to purchase a laptop for a wife, and since she wasn't interested in Windows 8, I wanted a Windows 7 Pro configuration so that it could join the domain at her workplace. I also perused Best Buy's PCs online and discovered that you can narrow the search by OS. On other "big brand" sites, you literally have to type in "windows 7" in the provided search box to locate Windows 7 machines. Most of them still have PCs with Windows 7, but generic searches only reveal Windows 8 PCs.