From: Adam 

Geo wrote:
> "Adam" <""4thwormcastfromthemolehill\"{at}the
field.near the bridge"> wrote in
> message news:44acacb7{at}w3.nls.net...
>
>> However I think that point is approaching & it will be either Vista or
>> it's sucessor which is the tipping point.
>
> There is no "tipping point". It's more like a slow steady
migration away,
> almost unnoticeable if you are just looking at month to month numbers.
>

Yes & no. There can be a steady incremental shift but then what has
been shown time after time wrt software is the power of the "network
effect" e.g. ye olde MS, Lotus & Borland slugging it out wrt
office suites & then MS incrementally achieved a "magic
number" & then network effect took over i.e. "everyone is
using word & thus we have to". Ditto Windows. Get to a given
market % & suddenly your market % grows to the upper 90'es.

wrt OSS the effects are if anything greater as once an OSS project has
"mindshare" often the others steadily wilt as people adopt the
front runner (e.g. Apache, JBOSS vs Jonas (& Geronimo, glassfish
etc.etc)), Linux vs BSD etc.

The counter current (which we are seeing wrt MS) is the effect of
complacency & "owning the market" which then tends to drive
to alternatives (e.g no development on IE drives people to Firefox, nasty
measures such as WGA  etc driving people to non key coded software etcetc.


> For example, I run nthelp.com and I work for an NT based ISP. But what's
> happening is I now have 4 linux devices and one laptop running linux at home
> and I've got linux based spam filters at the ISP and have refused to go
> beyond W2K on any machines (although I did participate in the XP and Vista
> betas and have activated XP and Vista at least a couple dozen times for
> testing purposes).
>

Oh quite. see above for the "counter current".


> Does Microsoft notice this, no, they see the test activations and figure I'm
> a loyal customer. I communicate my feelings to a couple of MS types but do
> they pass that up the food chain (Rich?) well I kind of doubt that since MS
> is now so huge you have major isolation. Nobody from the windows team ever
> goes out beyond the MS news groups to ask for feedback anymore.
>
> I honestly think Microsoft is so isolated from customers they are blind to
> the situation.
>

It's the complacency & arrogance born from owning the market. In
markets where they are number 2 etc they try harder & are far more
receptive to customer views but wrt those areas where they have
dominance....

Adam

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