Alexander Henry wrote:
> Ah, an engineering application.  Engineers are used to keeping old
 > technology lying around, and I understand why.  Once you have
 > something that gets the job done, why fix it?

It goes deeper than that.  A lot of packages in areas such as
CAD and mapping are very well established under Microsoft,
and there is no credible competition -- at least not in the
consciousness of most shops.  I expect that will be changing
over the next 5 - 10 years, but it'll take some aggressive work.

For example, Autocad is a standard, and Windows is where it's at.
In fact, of course, something like Autocad is expensive enough
that the OS licensing is a minor addition.  Prominent mapping
applications are deeply intertwingled with DLLs and Visual Basic.
(Remember we don't even have a complete answer for the popular
money-management programs yet!)

Of course WINE and VMWare may come to accommodate a lot of these
most popular packages, but again don't expect 100% replacement
too soon.