Interesting, This post was made in 2003, not much has changed.
Why has nothing changed?
Will GNU/Linux every overtake MS Windows? No.

How will GNU/Linux ever obtain more of the market share? The key to success is, what GNU/Linux needs to do, is dumb down.
Linspire, is perfect example of this dumbing down. Is Slackware-Linux being sold via Wal-Mart on per-loaded computers? No.
Linspire is, why? Because it is dumbed down enough.
This does not imply MS Windows user are "dumb" either. This just means that for GNU/Linux to become more popular it needs to be simpler to understand.
No matter how secure, stable, customizable a distro is, it's still entirely too complex for the Joe & Jane PC consumer.
AOL, shows that there are way to many computer users who just want things handled simply for them.

Why does so many tech reports say this or that about GNU/Linux overtaking the market, but they are thinking like techs, they know what they are doing. They forget, that most people do not care about being able to tweak their boxes, rebuild kernels, run servers.
Most people care less about how to fix a computer, build a computer, install an OS.
Same thing applies to cars. Most consumers just want a cheap car that works. They do not want to buy a car in a kit form, build their own engines, spend months tweaking the drive-train combo they purchased when it fails to work.
How many people buy automatic transmissions? Lots. They do not want to be bothered with shifting gears.
Why would these same consumers want to spend weeks figuring out how to set up their cheap printer and scanner on their GNU/Linux installation.They don't.

BeOS, was simple to install, could be installed on your PPC (603,604) or the x86. It failed for many reasons, one being that for the average consumer, MS Windows already does what BeOS does. They saw no point in purchasing another OS that does the same thing. Even the Free BeOS PE edition failed. It was free, so price really was not the issue either.

GNU/Linux, just does not offer enough differences to the average consumer to lure them in. Plus, getting new hardware toys just wont work with the distro for many months, til someone codes something. Sometimes, those cheap toys people buy, simply will never work.

Even with many of the major distros becoming what they term, "user friendly," it's still not going to appeal to the consumer who buys a PC to print, scan, take home photos, play some games on.

Then the question is, if, to lure all the customers from Microsoft, GNU/Linux distro's must become like MS Windows. Will it still be as useful for those who used it prior? Will the dumbing down make GNU/Linux less appealing to today's and yesterdays user, and make them look for something else to crusade?