Doom and Gloom Microsoft's going out of business yet again. Can you all stop dreaming out loud and wasting Internet bandwidth posting this crap?

Only Google, Novell, and Apple have the mindshare to challenge Microsoft. Sun has nice hardware and J2ee was inspired.

Microsoft is remarkable for its ability to continue to survive and prosper for years and years, and to recover from the mistakes it makes along the way.

In addition to Google, Novell, and Apple, another potential challenger may be Oracle. But all of the challengers, including Google, have a way to go before they can truly topple Microsoft.

Oh, "nobody." Eric didn't say anything about Microsoft going out of business. He did, however, point to more chinks appearing in Redmond's armor. The question is, what is Microsoft going to do about it?

Personally, I hope they do something about OWA -- and fast. It's a sad state of affairs when a free e-mail client such as Yahoo's beta e-mail app is superior, in many ways, to what MS has to offer.

And as an Outlook user, I'm grimly amused that searching my mailbox for messages requires employing Google Desktop.

Since nowadays, everything is done online, it makes absolutely no sense to use microsoft word for ANYTHING.

My office has 80 work stations and not 1 single printer because we never print a single document. All data is stroed onlinea nd is accessible 24 hours per day with a simple password.

THis being the case, it means that my email client is now Thunderbird. Why? because it writes in sinple satright forward HTML code that I can copya nd paste into any other online document anywhere withour fornatting problems.

Microsofts insistense on using proprietary code makes it a dead duck because there are so many character display issue sand other weird and wonderful elemnst that are just not compatible with standard html display.

Let us not forget that Word was originally designed as a 'word processor' a glorified type writer to enable us to print documnets easily and with pretty fonts that a type writer could not do.

Since nobody really cares any more becuase we are all writing in blogs instead of typing letters, then Microsoft word has lost it's relevance.

if any of you out there are still printing documents and spending ludicrous amounts of money on ink refilss?? Time to wake up and smell the HTML.

:))

Hi,
Google's StarOffice as a free download is another blow to the Mighty Microsoft.
Watching an interview recently with Bill Gates, I noticed when the name Google was mentioned Bill got real upset.
Go Figure!!
John McCall

Microsoft Office is getting plenty of competition from free alternatives. I read your post on Projity with OpenProj and downloaded it. Projity is looking for 7 - 11 million users of OpenProj. They are getting huge downloads so they may hit their target. This will probably be another solution packaged with Google and Star Office. The entire Office family of products now have replacements !!!! This is getting interesting very quickly. Microsoft Project costs $1,000 and is widely used on the desktop. This drives huge profits for Microsoft. The Google and Sun announcement is huge. The free distribution will completely undercut the entire Microsoft Office revenue stream. Three cheers for Google, Sun and now Projity !

Until your grandma can go to Sam's Club and get a Linux computer that works out of the box, Bill will still make lots of money.

Our computer lab at the local community college had a computer give away. The computers were old systems donated by companys and individuals. In the lab we went through the machines and installed windows 98 and gave them away to needy students. We installed Open office on the systems because we did not have a vol. licn for MS Office.
Every one was impressed with the performance and how it could read MS Office file and work with Word and Excel.

I have the latest version of Open Office running on my Vista machine.