EclecticLip

Yes, that’s an attempt at a pun.

In the past twenty-odd years, Microsoft has proven exceedingly good at dispatching business rivals.  They’ve been unstoppable spider-killers.

Even Google’s search dominance is a limited direct threat — Google has captured a new market, they aren’t “eating Microsoft’s lunch”. And open-source alternatives (Linux, OpenOffice) have been the business equivalent of blackflies, as opposed to, say, Viking raiders.
Until now.

Microsoft is taking a beating in the low-cost NetBook segment.  Their profit margins are squeezed, but that’s theoretically manageable (since NetBooks are so cheap, reduced per-unit profits should be offset by larger volumes).
But now, almost one-third of NetBooks are using Linux.  And that number’s likely to increase, as customer familiarity improves and manufacturers opt to save the estimated-$60 licensing charge for Windows.  Especially in an economic Depression.  (Seventy years ago, Pepsi used the jingle “twice as much for a nickel too” to great effect against Coke.)
Worse still, Linux is a starfish.  There’s no CEO, no central command structure, no symbolic metonym to attack.  (Except maybe the penguin.)  It’s a vaporous foe. In past years, Microsoft has followed Sun Tzu’s wisdom from The Art of War:

• striking with chaos  (spreading FUD, announcing vaporware)
• securing victory indirectly   (bundling Windows with Word/Excel/Office)
• unleashing its might like pent-up water crashing a thousand fathoms into a gorge   (the all-hands about-face to crush Netscape)

(as an aside, Google’s ability to stay private for so long allowed them to operate under Microsoft’s radar — in Sun Tzu’s words, if you rashly underestimate your enemy, you wil surely be taken captive.)

Microsoft’s far from cooked — they’re striking back with Windows Seven and probably have a few killer apps left in them, like Quantum of Solace-featured Surface — but they’ve lost their aura of invincibility, their shih.  They could face a long, slow, drawn-out fight against a nimbler, asymmetric foe.  They’d do well to do something decisive, and fast (low-ball pricing for Windows Seven, to knock Linux out of all but the very cheapest NetBooks?).  To draw from Sun Tzu’s well a final time,

• no [one] has ever benefited from a protracted war