According to one of my reseller trade rags, only 10% of current business customers plan to upgrade to XP. Over 60% of Microsoft's business customers are still running 95/98, and most of the rest are running older Win2K. This portends a grim future for upgrades to Windows.NET, and for .NET itself.

That would be CRN, right? MSFT is getting ready to spray money all over the channel to try and get them to push XP out to the customers by developing systems that require it. Reading between the lines of what the MSFT VP was saying, they're feeling a little desparate... ME sucked, and XP is only being a success in their tightest customers.

[link|http://consultron.ca/english|I'm still doing] the [link|http://www.ecomstation.com|ecomstation] gig, and judging by some of the recent contacts, people are finally ready to ditch MSFT. We could be looking at one of those major market break points where things start to change extremely rapidly...

The objective of Office 11 is "tight integration" with other Microsoft products - through the magic of XML. This can't be standard XML, because the threat tight integration is designed to counter, StarOffice / OpenOffice, already uses standard XML as its native file format. It's going to have to be pure, unadulterated "Microsoft XML".

This latest announcement is possibly the breaking point... I suspect that the news that Office 11 is going to require spyware revisions of Windows is behind some of the recent contacts I've received... companies (and esp. companies that deal with confidential data) are actually actively seeking alternatives.