It's the modern-day equivalent of bear-baiting, I tell you. Steven Den Beste writes 5000 words (plus another 17000 words worth of pictures) tweaking the Mac faithful and they respond. My question is: why?

Or to rephrase the question slightly, who cares what's on the business desktops? Companies that have specific software needs purchase the software they really need, and whatever hardware is appropriate to run it, and the decision is made in that order. Sure, there are lots of Intel chips running Windows on various desktops, but they're the red-headed stepchildren of the business world. If you're in the image manipulation business, your art-school dropouts have Macs. Sure, the MBAs in the front office have Windows so as to make those shiny PowerPoint presentations and to read the Word docs from the client, but the real guts of the business is on (as far as I can tell) Macs and the serious Unix hardware in the glass house.

When you're serious about performance, you go buy a Sun E10000 and run Oracle on it. They're both complicated products from companies with truly horrific pricing schemes, require a professional priesthood to sacrifice the goats at the right time, and provide lifetime employment for their cadre, but when you by-Gawd have to have the data available, that's where you have to go.

In modern post-pro houses, I'd bet the artists are probably running Maya, and the render farm is almost assuredly running Linux. Those guys don't seriously give a crap about the material on the desktop, which is why they can afford to let Windows in the building at all. If it was really a corporate asset, it'd be housed on a Unix box. Where do you think all those source code repositories live? Where is the actual rendering of the 425 FX shots for "Matrix Reloaded" taking place?

I'll give you a hint: it doesn't involve Redmond.