Have felt that IBM is now about to play MS off against Sun & Oracle while IBM knows it has the bits needed to make Web Services work while MS is desperately trying to convince world its .Net strat is real.

SAP voted loudly & significantly when they recently announced that they were going with J2EE & they have no desire to piss MS off, they merely stated what will soon become obvious, MS just don't have enough of .Net inplace for large corporations & software suppliers to bet their future on + few trust MS anymore, to be honest about how good its position is. Our company is significant in this region & we have stated J2EE is our technology direction. I see it & discuss these issues regularly with regional execs from BEA (WebLogic), SilverStream, IBM etc: & MS are seen as all strategy but little tangible teachnology to back it. Even Gartner etc: are still questioning the viablity of theMS delivery.

MS needs funds to finance its vast .Net technologies - the one thing they have done well is to talk about .Net & articulate it as a strategy but filling it all in my prove more than they can handle in the time needed. To compound MS woes we have the worst downturn in business in years just when they need to wring more $ from the public.

Cheers

Doug