> All MSFT has to sell is knowledge, so consquently their chart
> ain't looking to good of late.
this isn't quite true. ms's operating systems were always a step behind sun, say, when it came to things like reliability and performance. (remember, it wasn't until win95 that they even gave folks true multitasking or put a network stack into the kernel, which already put them literally decades behind other os's). the "dll hell" of incompatible upgrades, which necessitate all of this automation, to maintain consistency, is also something of their own doing, and purposeful, and entirely unnecessary from the point of the view of the user or the user's convenience.
microsoft's strength has been its presence and its monopoly and its ability to hold onto that monopoly. and through that, their ability to make folks pay significantly more for software than it costs to make, and to buy things that they don't really need.
without the monopoly, msft is much less than it was. when the competition is "free" ... msft ends up competeting in ibm's court (free software, pay for services). and with cash strapped it departments everywhere, where is the money going? (e.g. how many millions can a large company save by giving everyone open office instead of ms office? they have *nearly* the same functionality, up to reading the same legacy documents, with the exception of embedded visual basic stuff. what you save in $$ more than makes up for what you lose in functionality. and if that's not entirely true now, it become more true every day. after all, its just software ...)
AI
