[BrianBSL]

Originally Posted by Timothy D. Ginn

Adoption of .NET isn't as stellar as hopes for it had been (including within Microsoft -- MS Anti-Spyware built on MS Abandonware).

Microsoft Anti-Spyware wasn't written by microsoft - they bought it from GIANT Anti-Spyware (same product) and now give it away for free. Its the same situation when they bought hotmail and it originally ran on Unix servers.

Originally Posted by Timothy D. Ginn

Oh, and Firefox is causing the market share of IE to slip; IE also wasn't even included in the latest version of Mac OS X.

Because once Safari came out, Microsoft stopped devloping IE for OSX. Firefox has very little to do with the Mac market, because Safari is so closely related to Mozilla's stuff. Tho, I actually have more problems with Safari than I do with IE, so I use Firefox on both.

Originally Posted by Timothy D. Ginn

I wouldn't count MS out by any means at this point; but they're certainly nowhere near their height so, by that standard, I'd say they are declining.

I guess it depends on your definition of declining...I would argue their products are far better than 5-10 years ago, its just as they have gotten better, so has everyone else (or perhaps the other way around).

Originally Posted by alphastryk

just btw, here @ my work (Georgia Tech Reasearch Institute), at least for my dept, we use firefox+thunderbird, so...

If you've never used shared meetings, resources, tasks, etc, you don't know what you are missing. Probably doubles my productivity in a day to be able to have people send me meeting requests etc and have it all work, voting buttons, integration with Active Directory (if you use MWSS), etc. Theres only a few products that rival it, namely Notes and Kerio Mail (although Kerio relies heavily on having Outlook). I'm not saying its impossible (Outlook + Windows Server + Exchange + CAL's is major money so there are people who don't use it), but for those who have used it there's no switching back.

Just my $.02.