Well, I saw the adverts from the Japanese company and I was rather annoyed.
Yahoo puts them on their site.
Do not worry, Microsoft has no reason for being scared either of the new
Japanese OS or the new Google Chrome OS.
Linux developers also do not have reasons to be scared or too impressed by
these OSes.
Unfortunately Windows will be still present for lots of time on the majority
of PCs and unfortunately Windows XP is the best one. I tested 7, it is
interesting, it is quite beautiful but I would not recommend it for everyday
work. It is too resource-hungry and you may get surprises when trying to run
some old software. Other, good surprises were that I could install my sound
drivers, proprietary software like Office 2000, Office 2003, open-source
software like Open Office, Mplayer, Pidgin, VLC Player and lots of others.
Indeed, Windows 7 boots up rather slowly as compared to XP (about 2 minutes, I
think) but there are lots of fast-booting alternatives that can be used at any
time. Microsoft would be wise to sell XP again or something similar or make
Windows really secure, which is something that will not happen very soon, if at
all.
For Windows 7 users I would recommend dual booting with XP or Windows 2000 and
for Linux users i would recommend Ubuntu or an Ubuntu-based one and to carry
some live CDs like Puppy, NimbleX or Slax and Knoppix (these three should be
compulsory subject in school). Ubuntu should be compulsory subject in school,
also, in Romania at least.
By the way, I think Windows 7 and XP will not get blown away, Vista most
probably will.

Who among us don't feel that MS lied to us left-and-right about the greatness of
Vista. Now they come out with Win 7 and start the same lies again. Come on, MS
OSs are memory/resources hogs. Sooner or later someone is going to come out with
a open source OS that, while not everyone will be using it but it "will" be the
defacto standard on all new PCs like the way MS is now.

I predict that at some point in time Microsoft's OS will become a MS
tuned Linux distro and MS will focus on building gadgets such as X-Box
and Zune. This would seriously cut their overhead costs while retaining
profits. My prediction is that in the next decade there will still be
an OS named Windows, but it will be a product straight out of Novell.
SUSE as a brand name will cease to exist and be rebranded as Windows.

And guaranteed long term support -
unlike microsoft who have given up on win98, and keep saying they will stop
supporting winxp.

not so sure about that! First, ubuntu introduced me to linux
and i love the distro. Second, it's stability since 8.04 has been
questionable. Personally i think [also after a long chat with one of
their xubuntu developers] i have my concerns about their workload with
the 6 month release cycle... Fedora have the same problem.

For linux to compete effectively at a high standard they need more
cash and 6 month releases will be testing and that the biannual
enterprise versions will be the standard stable release.

I just trying out Centos and Debian at present on my spare machine.
I'm still on 8.04 and seriously wonder if 10.4 will as stable.

Time will tell... but i'm giving up on 'cutting edge' releases on any distro.

My experience with ubuntu has been the opposite of yours. I've found
8.04 LTS to be rock solid.

As for stability, 10.04 LTS should be just as good, if not better.
Canonical has recently made a change in that regard. Ubuntu used to be
based on debian-unstable, but beginning with 10.04 it is based on
debian-testing. I'm running 10.04 Alpha on 2 machines and while I've
seen a few minor buglets here and there, it's totally usable. I'm
looking forward to updating all my 8.04 machines to 10.04.

Of course, they also offer the fedora-style 6 month releases for the
adventurous, and I try those on desktop/laptop machines, but my servers
are all on 8.04 LTS and won't be upgraded until after 10.04 is released,
if even then.