Subject was: "Re: Just in case you haven't seen this" Thanks, Carl. Definitely worth the read. A few chuckles, a little encouragement, but also a sobering reminder of what business is all about: Getting the customer's goals met. When it comes to program management, the Open Source movement needs to learn from their opposition. This part of the Valentine letter is interesting: Finally, there's the Ameritrade team. Lloyd Arrow and team lost initially to Linux in the design phases by getting vetoed by the CIO, even after winning on all other merits. After several months of schedule slips trying to implement Linux, the Ameritrade CIO resigned. The account team was back at it with the new CIO and within a month were ready to deploy Ameritrade's most strategic apps, their Stream Quotes Servers, on Windows 2000. This is a key win and will expand from 5 servers to 100's of servers as the service is rolled out to all of Ameritrade's customers. Think of ongoing per-server fees they will collect. You have to respect their selling ability, but letting the competition hang themselves first is pretty effective. The tattoo business is a little wierd -- this guy is scarey: Lloyd now has more body surface area saved to get that Windows tattoo he has always wanted! Whoever set up the Largo systems should now be duly alerted. Think they can respond in an "agile" manner to the enterprise server issues that MS hopes to raise? They'll have to be on their toes. Reminds me of this article from August: "Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web?" by Ganesh Prasad. http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-13-009-20-OP I have total respect for Microsoft for their ability to sell their point of view, and to get a showcase solution into place. They have gotten where they are through a coherent, ambitious product and marketing strategy, and Open Source won't get past the guerilla stage unless its practitioners are every bit as focused and hungry. It could be fun to watch. And/or painful. Vic