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The facts about MS are simple, they dominate a static market, and all attempts to expand out of it have failed, and will continue to fail. Their core is desktop OS and Office....there is little reason to update office or your OS, so vast majority of sales are with new machines, and people and more importanly companies are starting to wisen up to this fact. I mean lets be honest with ourselves, what really new features has Office had in years? What about the OS? What Killer feature would warrant a company to upgrade? None... and with new machines now far faster than even the average business user can push, lease trade in will be only reasons for upgrading, not forced obsolecense.. This does not bode well for MS.

Secondly, the world today is about free information exchange, its the DATA.. The web exploded because of what? DATA!!! Fast, endless and useful/useless data. Format/OS independent data! The same movement will happen in other data formats.

The writing is on the wall and every attempt for MS to escape from those basic fundamental facts has to this point failed. Tried to go into gaming, and blew it in the all important Japanese market, losing money and not gaining market share but will keep fighting the mod chip guys... handheld attempts are doing about the same.

There is a huge thing to be said for places like Europe right now where the governments have conciously chosen to go all opensource... all documents, data etc is common.. the applications used to access and change them is free, as is an os they sit on. Anyone in the community can get a CD with all the software on it for free, or virtually free, and then install on their machines. Any government agency, and the people themselves are now all free to exchange any info they want, with anyone else that they want and have reasonable expectation that every one will be able to use or view the information.

The day of the proprietary solution for the general case application are coming to an end, its not going to happen overnight, and its not going to kill companies in that industry, but they will become less and less important. And every attempt by MS to keep forced proprietarianism will make it more and more irrellevant. MS suffers from IBMitis... WE KNOW BETTER THAN YOU DO HOW TO DO THINGS.. ITS OUR WAY OR THE HIGHWAY.... IBM had that same mentality in the 80s, we do EPSIDIC not ASCII... etc etc etc.

MS is not going anywhere, but they still don't realize the fundamental shift that is happening, or maybe they realize it, but have no idea how to deal with it.

I am sure the usual suspects will show up to tell me I'm wrong, but I do believe its going to happen, and its not because I hate MS, and love Linux. Though portraying me as such may make good fodder. Computers are commodities, and as the base model price point continues to DROP I just don't see MS keeping its margins, and I have yet to see MS effectively expand its operations outside its core, it keeps trying, but just haven't seen it manage it yet.

There is a huge thing to be said for places like Europe right now where the governments have conciously chosen to go all opensource... all documents, data etc is common.. the applications used to access and change them is free, as is an os they sit on. Anyone in the community can get a CD with all the software on it for free, or virtually free, and then install on their machines.

I don't necessarily want to disagree with what you've said. No marketplace seems to move as quickly and as ruthlessly as does the IT sector. On the other hand, you're making the assumption that just because free alternatives exist, people will choose to use them. This may not be the case, either now, or in the foreseeable future. I'll give you a few examples.

If you fall ill with some life-threatening illness, you can check into the local emergency room, and expect a bill of tens of thousands of dollars, or you can go online, research some folk medicines, find a recipe for an herbal remedy, go outside, pick the herbs from your garden, bring them in, and simmer them on your stovetop, all for free. Which option would you choose?

If you want to build your dream house, you can call up the local contractors, have them bid on the project, and pay one of them to build it for you, or, you can spend every weekend from now until the end of eternity hauling wood from Home Depot to your construction site so that you can build it, for free, for yourself.

People bitch and moan about Microsoft products, but the simple fact of the matter is that those products are used BECAUSE THEY ADD VALUE. Gnome & KDE can't hold a candle to the W2K/XP interfaces. There isn't a spreadsheet in the world with the ease of use of Excel. Outlook [despite its past security problems] is the best scheduler in the business. Period.

People are willing to pay extra for quality. The challenge for Microsoft [and Sun, and IBM, and HPQ, and all the old-timers] is to make sure that the quality of their products justifies the pricetags. I think they call it building a better mousetrap...