MS makes yet another smart move 1714

As web-based and collaborative apps start becoming more common, yeah I can see Office monopoly going away. Adding more features isn't the answer - hardly anyone uses more than 20% of the core features of, say, Word. It's been a 'de facto' standard for a while, but now there's things like PDF for heavily formatted docs, and forms distributed electronically are moving to the web. Most people don't use anything that Office 97 didn't offer, and Linux offers all that and more.

As the actual nature of the client becomes less important, Windows will become less important. Windows has a fair amount of inertia, but aside from games it doesn't have a heck of a lot of exclusive content to offer. The growth of Firefox and Thunderbird has shown that security is, in fact, becoming a necessary feature to compete. Windows hasn't done all that well in general on that score. The LAND vulnerability actually came *back*, for example.

Microsoft hasn't expanded out of its core (desktops) the way it wanted. It's definitely way behind on the high end (Windows for Clusters won't offer features *currently available* in Linux until version 3.0) and hasn't made much impact in the low end (embedded) where margins are tight enough that license fees are a major consideration.

The nature of the desktop will change in the next few years, I think. Flash drives and such will let people take their desktop with them (there's already Linux distros that boot and run from flash drives or even rewritable CDs) and apps and info will be distributed. Windows will have to work to move into this space; Linux is already there.

-- Sincerely,

Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317

Microsoft Windows - Let it get in YOUR way.