I once owned a piece of a book store, which ran its inventory on bookstore-specific inventory/sales software written for Windows. The software company eventually folded, as most do, but the book store still had 50,000+ volumes on that software with no easy way to move them to new software. The old software ran fine -- as long as it ran on Windows. This is, written small, the problem MS has with a lot of its customers. Sooner or later, though, a company has to bite the bullet and say, "We're starting new." MS could do it; it'd just irritate a lot of people, and also damage quite a few. If you have dead-ended software with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of items on it, you can literally go bankrupt trying to change to a new system.
MS, of course, claimed in courts all over the world that it's not effectively a monopoly, and the wierd thing is, it's possible that they believe it, and see threats everywhere. But right now, I think the main threat to MS is itself, and its refusal to thoroughly modernize from the bottom up. They keep trying to buy patches to fix things; but I'm not sure that's possible any longer.
I switched to Macs several years ago, because they seemed like toasters -- if you needed to do several specific common things (in my case, word processing, Photoshop and browsing the net) then they were fine. If you wanted to do some other things, like run a modern highway map program, learn Urdu, or use some kind of odd function-specific hardware, then they weren't so fine. And I doubt that they ever will be -- Macs are consumer machines, like iPods. They offer ease of use, rather than range of function.
JC
