Jon Brodkin

For all its success as the world's biggest maker of PC operating systems and office programs, Microsoft's position as the dominant provider of software to consumers is at risk.

While Windows still powers the vast majority of desktops and laptops, the emergence of mobile devices and increasing reliance on the Internet have shown consumers and businesses alike that much of what we call personal computing can be done without touching a single Microsoft product.

The mythical "year of the Linux desktop" still hasn't come, and may never, but on the 20th anniversary of Linux the free operating system's proponents threw a party to celebrate its success and scoff at past attacks launched by Microsoft, its biggest rival.

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin - known among Network World readers for saying that bashing Microsoft is "like kicking a puppy" - used his keynote at the LinuxCon conference in Vancouver to recount past slights from Microsoft and explain how wrong they were, one by one.

Google's Web-based Chromebooks can now access Windows desktops and applications through Citrix's virtualization technology, thanks to a new app released this week.

The Citrix Receiver Tech Preview for Chrome OS, available on the Chrome Web Store, is a free client app for businesses that use Citrix virtualization to host desktops and applications in the data center.

Pop quiz: Can you name every smartphone platform that's more popular than Windows Phone 7? Go on. We dare you.

Let's start with the easy ones. The iPhone and Android could restrict sales to three hours a day and still beat Microsoft's mobile platform with ease. Apple's year-old iPhone 4 outsells all Windows phones combined many times over. Even the supposedly failing Symbian and BlackBerry have market shares Steve Ballmer would jump up and down for.

After criticism over new restrictions on the amount of virtual memory customers can deploy before having to buy new licenses, VMware has boosted the limits on virtual RAM so high that most customers should not be negatively affected.

VMware's new licensing model introduced on July 12 was an attempt to shift from pricing based on physical resources to pricing based on virtual resources, perhaps a sensible move given that VMware is a virtualization company. As VMware says, its goal is to "align costs with the benefits of virtualization rather than with the physical attributes of each individual server."

More than a dozen Adobe products are not working properly on Mac OS X Lion, Apple's new desktop operating system, continuing Adobe's struggles to make its software compatible with Apple products.

The issues -- listed by Adobe on its website -- aren't as cut and dried as the problem with Flash on iOS, which is that Apple blocks use of Flash on iPhones and iPads.

In Google's early days, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin argued that answering email complaints would be a waste of time, and that Googlers should fix problems behind the scenes without interacting directly with users, according to a former Google employee who wrote a book about his time at the company.

Google's customer service remains a problem today, with users complaining that a Google Calendar notification problem went months without being fixed while Google employees rarely responded to complaints.

Microsoft dropped support for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this week, and recommended that Vista users buy Windows 7 or upgrade to the most recent version of Vista.

There were two Vista service packs. Support for the first ended Tuesday, while Service Pack 2 will continue to receive mainstream support until April 10, 2012, and the more limited "extended support" until April 11, 2017. Once support for a service pack ends, that software no longer receives security updates.

Microsoft's annual partner conference last week featured previews of the Windows 8 server and desktop operating systems, talk of integration between Skype and Lync, and a barrage of insults aimed at the company's competitors.

While Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer scoffed at Apple's Mac sales numbers compared to the 400 million Windows 7 licenses sold, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner bashed Google, Cisco, IBM, Oracle and VMware.

Any computer running Windows 7 will be upgradable to Windows 8, Microsoft said today while pledging to keep hardware requirements level or even lower when the next version of Windows comes out.

Microsoft says it has sold more than 400 million Windows 7 licenses, but Windows XP is still nearly twice as commonly used worldwide. Yet Microsoft has already shown two technical previews of Windows 8, and announced today that a further preview of Windows 8 is coming in September. Therefore, Microsoft has a balancing act to convince businesses and consumers to upgrade to Windows 7 despite the promise of a new operating system around the corner.

Skype will be thoroughly integrated with Microsoft's Lync communications software, assuming regulators approve the $8.5 billion acquisition, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said this week.

Lync, which is being sold both as a server product and a cloud-based service, will not lose any prominence in the Microsoft software lineup once Skype comes on board, Ballmer said in a keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles.

Microsoft lost its title as the world's biggest tech company this year with Apple surging ahead in market cap, profit and revenue.

Yet Microsoft still has ammo in the numbers department to take shots at its biggest rival, and many others, besides.