Jim wrote:

> Congress is getting involved in the whole issue, including XP
>
> http://www.arizonarepublic.com/arizona/articles/0724microsoft24-ON.html
>
> Maybe MS's arrogance is finally gonna hurt them. If you p*ss off enough
> people to get a couple of US Senators, maybe it is time to learn from past
> mistakes.
>
> Obviously, never one to learn from the past, MS plods ahead, ignoring common
> sense, good business practices, US law, and logic.  They are proving yet
> again that the only thing that matters to them is the bottom line.

Ya gotta wonder ... they say that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.  What MS is doing seems incredibly similar with what
IBM was doing in the early 70's that got them into such hot water.

Borland just reported that some 35% of their revenues last quarter came from JBuilder.  Their marketing research says that the use of
Java has been expanding at an incredibly fast rate this year, and that they don't see much of a drop off in demand of Java-oriented
development tools over the next several quarters.  The largest growth in their sales has come from large corporations.

In stark contrast, Microsoft has announced that Java will NOT be supported in their next generation OS.  I guess this is supposed to be
an enticement to all those corporate customers who'll have to wade through the mine fields MS plants in XP after signing on to long-term
subscription agreements for an OS that appears to be heading in a direction that's not where they might be going.

If memory serves, the EC passed some "regulations" in the mid-80's that required all new software and computing systems contracts to be
POSIX compliant, in defiance of IBM's "proprietary sytems" posturing.  IBM gave 'em the finger and lost billions of dollars in European
business.  Amdahl and DEC both supported Unix and took lots of IBM's mainframe business in the EC market.   Wasn't it only about a year
later when IBM announced a new product line (AIX on the RS-6000) that was fully POSIX-compliant that enabled them to resume competing
for European business?

-David