All these META guys are saying, and it makes some sense, is that if linux in fact achieves something like 50% market share on servers, Microsoft would be foolish to ignore that as a market for things like Exchange and SQL Server. They're right. It's probably one of those things, though, that Microsoft will deny right up until the day they announce it's ready to ship.
This business of trying to Dominate Ze Vorld by tying all your products together in unique and wonderful ways has its place as a marketing strategy, but as IBM learned the hard way many years ago, the bigger you get the harder it becomes to keep it going.
A big part of the "IBM renaissance" under Gerstner was losing that idea and moving to a strategy of having point products that were excellent at what they did, and could stand on their own in any environment. You want NT? They'll sell you NT. You want linux? They'll sell you linux. The OS/390 guys can squawk all they want; the WebSphere and DB/2 guys do not have to cripple their own products in order to make OS/390 look good. I think Microsoft will have as hard a time with this transition as IBM did... it is a tough thing to implement in a big-company culture. But sooner or later, they're going to have to learn how.
This is going to be a long thread.
Nick, I'm a little slow on the uptake today (as always) and I don't understand your point. Can you elucidate?