With Scott McNealy’s career ignominiously ending with a whimper, and Jonathan Schwartz offering more of the same, its ironic that the company that coined the term “the network is the computer” continues on its 5-year long controlled crash.

As Ray Ozzie, MS’s new geek-in-chief basically conceded in his “Internet Services Disruption” memo last October, “computing and communications technologies have dramatically and progressively improved to enable the viability of a services-based model”.

And its not just talk. Steven Ballmer just announced that Microsoft will increase MSN’s research budget by 57% to 1.1b to go head-to-head with Google, with “software delivered as a service as its top priority.”

Yep. The Network is the Computer Indeed! It just doesn’t run Solaris on expensive Sun hardware, but on Linux-based commodity PCs.

As more and more companies convert to Linux for mission-critical services (with Internet 2.0 darlings like Google and Amazon leading the charge), Sun’s fortunes are only bound to get worse. One glance at Netcraft’s latest web server survey is telling - Sun only runs 2.36 % of websites, with Linux at 62.72% and MS at 25.22%.

And yes, that 25.22% is inflated. Last month, the survey pegged MS at 20.51%. It only spiked when MS paid parked-domain provider GoDaddy to switch to Windows 2003. You know Microsoft is desperate when its reduced to “bribing” domain-parking giants to artificially spike their numbers.

Regardless, Linux has arrived and is here to stay, FUD or otherwise. And stay right there in the datacenter, not at your desktop.

The desktop market is simply Window’s domain. Despite the viruses, the swiss cheese security model and all its flaws, Windows is deeply entrenched.

Us Mac fanboys can shout ourselves hoarse (as we often do), and we can argue with Windows fans until we’re both blue in the face. In the end, both camps will just convince each other of how right they are. When they say that Macs and Windows fans go at it with “religious fervor”, its ironic how the metaphor is sadly appropriate.