Apart from absolutely bonehead articles like this here, Forbes magazine, and Forbes.com continue to deliver accurate business information.

This article, titled Teflon Windows, is indicative of the cred' Forbes has with the financial community and that I have blogged about here and here.

Excerpts:

So what happened? Well, there are now 665 million copies of XP installed worldwide, giving it 74.3% share of the PC installed base. Other versions of Windows account for another 190 million units, or 21.6% share.

The Mac, for all of Apple's snazzy advertising, has less than 1.6% share of the PC installed base. Linux, for all of the millions of column inches devoted to its wondrous abilities (many of those lines by yours truly), holds about 2.5% share.

[...]

Another reason: With 3,000 Microsofties blogging, and Microsoft’s two Internet TV channels drawing a combined 4.5 million viewers each month, the company doesn’t need to rely on the mainstream media as much as it used to.

Most telling though, is the conclusion of the writer:

I’ve been running Vista for a while now on one of my older PCs. This machine doesn’t have enough memory or processor power to run the full-blown Aero interface. So all I’m using is the low-end “Basic” version of Vista.

But I can say this much: The upgrade from XP went off without a hitch. Vista figured out what hardware I had, and automatically set itself to run in Basic mode. It immediately found all of my peripherals. (By contrast, my recent installation of Novell's SLED 10 Linux desktop required a special visit to a Novell engineer, and a few hours of custom hacking on his part.)

Performance on the Vista machine is great--it’s faster than on any of my Macs, .......

In other words, things are fine. I’ve had no headaches on the Vista machine. No crashes, no hang-ups.....

And although I still prefer the Mac, I’m sure that, as my pals at Microsoft would no doubt be very glad to tell me, it doesn’t really matter what I think. Vista is going to be huge, no matter what.

And that is a jaded reviewer with no doubt a jaundiced eye.

However, can you imagine what a regular user would feel.

Ladies and gentlemen: