The duopoly between operating systems and hardware makes me laugh. You could say there's some duopoly between hardware manufactures and some software developers, but frankly, nobody is waiting for a new operating system to come out and take advantage of their newly acquired hardware. Hardware constantly advances, independently of the software, and people updates it as they want, no one is going to stay for years with their old systems (the saying "if it works, why change it?" has a limited life IMHO).
I wonder... if there's this "Wintel" thing, why is Intel one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel, and why Apple now uses x86 architecture? Or why they're pushing their products in every market they can put a processor in. Intel fortunes now depend on themselves, maybe there was a time that Windows was capital in their strategy, but if Windows goes down, and something else takes its place, Intel will simply chug along. And AMD as well (if they can finally rid of red numbers next year).
Nobody wanted a Core 2 Duo?
Of course, all of this can't hide the fact that Microsoft went a little overboard this time with Vista requirements, but in the case of Office, OpenOffice can't really be an example of how to make efficient office suites. And like the recent blog entry that Jeff Atwood published, software tends to spoil after some versions. Ask Adobe, Symantec, Corel, etc. Hey, a theory: Big company -> Inefficient software
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