Why Linux will win and Micro$oft will lose

[foodog]

George Toft wrote:
> 
> Bob Cober wrote:
> [snip]
> > My (lengthy) point is this.  Hopefully, someday in the future, the company
> > will not provide your OS or even your hardware.  You will bring that with
> > you.  Your PC is like your wallet, or even part of your own brain.  You will
> > bring it with you from job to job.  All the company IT people do is provide
> > a place for you to plug in.  As long as we use more and more Open Standards
> > like TCP/IP, this might be possible.  Let the user select his own computing
> > device...!!!!
> 
> Two words: Proprietary Information or Intellectual Property.  All
> the e-mail, etc that you saved or replicated on your hard drive is
> Company Property, and they won't want you leaving with it.
> 
> George

Since we're talking "years in the future", I like to think that someday
society at large will be able to use cryptography effectively and
develop "trusted systems".  

When you leave the company, you'll surrender your physical access key
(of whatever form) and also lose the ability to sign onto the company
keyserver to decrypt their proprietary data on your system.  Their
data/mail can safely stay on your storage device while you try to
brute-force the keys for the next forty quadrillion years (or taking
Moore's law into account, maybe only a few billion years)...

Steve