Theoretical death of Windows.

I often think of how if Windows died tomorrow, there would be a consumer-ready Unix available within the month.

What is still preventing this is that there is absolutely no way anyone would inflict the cruelty of putting Linux on their family's computers, and any other average person would never take the cruelty willingly.

This leaves the userbase exclusively to people dedicated to using their OS - not Windows refugees. So this leaves the development and the drive behind it to people who do not want a simple, gooey operating system.

In short: because the force behind the development is in the wrong direction, we cannot get a good Windows alternative. If the immense force of a global demand for a new OS was released, it could create innumerable numbers of operable Linux distributions.

What we as a society need for the development of our civilization technologically is an unstoppable worm that destroys all XP installations.

The whole Linux movement is too liberal.  What we need is a set of closed standards that force people to develop specifically for that OS, while eliminating all competing OS's.  DirectX, for example.