...to the stock market.

This is exactly the reason for .Net, the intrusive aspects of XP, and the fairly desperate measures Microsoft is employing re licensing -- the bit with the charity in Australia, for instance.

Win2000 is NOT a compelling upgrade for anybody. If you really need that strong an OS, NT4 SP6a does a fine job, and as somebody pointed out in another forum I read, it's now at end-of-cycle... which if nothing else means they aren't tweaking (and breaking) it any more.

None of the x2000 apps -- Office, FrontPage, etc. -- offer enough that's new to make the effort of installing worthwhile. I even know one or two people who've tried it, then scrubbed and reinstalled NT, or even Win98 SE.

Unfortunately Microsoft's appeal to the stock market is and has always been based on revenue growth. W2000 didn't tank, exactly, but nobody got excited, and that translates into essentially flat revenues. Millenium Edition got the same response or worse. So now, in order to protect their position on Wall Street, they're flailing hard to come up with some way to compel people to send them money. But -- they haven't gotten any smarter in the interim; and what they're doing is starting to be obvious to the most pointy-haired of bosses ["What? We _have_ to connect to the Internet to do XP? Them cretins'll be downloading porn all day instead of working!"] and to the accountants and the like. Send Mo' Money Regular is not an attractive proposition.

IOW: Microsoft is just the biggest dot.com, and it will take longer for the bubble to deflate, but IMO deflate it will.