Ok, but Bill Gates seems less likely to be stymied by anti-trust lawyers than IBM did. He’s rather good at spotting business mistakes and adapting to them.
I suspect that an MS OS will dominate the desktop PC market forever. Whether they will dominate the non-PC market, though is another matter entirely.
Gorsnak: *If people don’t think Linux poses a threat to Microsoft, I’d personally be very curious as to why Microsoft is scared shitless by the growing number of companies and governments that are shifting or considering shifting to Linux. *
Because only the paranoid survive as monopolists.
I didn’t know about Visual Studio; thanks. Excel, IMHO, is a surprisingly good product. More generally though, Word and the Office Suite established itself primarily through shady business tactics. Specifically, Microsoft was able to get a stable word processing product out first when they unveiled Windows 95 (how about that?). Once established, it makes sense for users to use Word rather than Wordperfect because… everyone else uses Word and compatibility is a key feature. (This is an example of what economists call “network externalities”: a “network” becomes more valuable to each user as more users join it.)