And with Gates gone next year, the company will lose most of what defined it.
ACtually it lost what defined it when Paul Allen left. If something breaks in XP, it's usually easily fixable.
Or in reality, you're totally at Microsofts mercy and it takes them 284 days to address critical and well documented security flaws in their own software. I'd imagine Linux people would have problems if everyone used linux. It would be the main focus of internet attackers.
That wouldn't matter. Due to it's open source nature, anyone can patch vulnurabilities.