When you’re driving a car, the road in front of you changes fast and, in order to avoid a collision, you have to turn, speed up, and slow down in response to these changes. Now imagine if you couldn’t change course or speed until the person sitting next to you told you. Before too long, you’d probably crash. That’s exactly where Windows is right now.

The tech world is changing faster than ever before. Did you know you can buy a flash drive with an eSATA connection? That’s a 32GB, portable, and speedy SSD in something only slightly bigger than, well, your thumb that could easily store your operating system and all your data. Have you been following the emergence of web tablets? Just like the road, things change really fast in technology.

Just look at what happened with netbooks. Microsoft may have caught itself, but they were not prepared for the emergency of netbooks. Netbooks are currently forcing them to keep alive an operating system they wanted to kill years ago. New technology doesn’t wait for 5 year release cycles. It just comes.

This isn’t necessarily about open-source vs. proprietary software. In theory, you could develop an incredibly flexible piece of proprietary software that could be modified to react as soon as the new technology hit, but at this point, the only operating systems that can consistently be there for the people releasing new, cutting edge technology are those that are open source – specifically Linux.

Microsoft is being the backseat driver in an era when there is no time for a delay.

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