lol Swoop. Reminds me of the bumper sticker an employee put on my wall one day..."Unix has no balls".
You are correct about how many people have made a living off of MS mess-ups.
My sales of E-Mail servers and support contracts went through the roof after MS released W2K. Of course, I have an outrageous support policy. I give a 100% refund if the server crashes/fails within 1 year of installation.
Never had to make that refund yet, but I have lost some support contracts because of it as well. "Roy, why do we need a support contract,..the thing just works".
There are things that are easily accomplished on a Unix based server that simply cannot be done on a MS based server. It also is significantly cheaper to accomplish those things in Unix versus MS. Of course, you do give up the proprietary MS stuff when you choose Unix as your OS. Small price to pay for stability though, especially when your business depends on that server.
MS has done some good things for Unix, at large. Prior to MS jumping into the server OS market, everyone complained about how complex and difficult Unix was/is. It did not take long for MS to make Unix look good.
I can always tell when a client brings up a W2K server and enables DNS. Our DNS servers get flooded with DNS update requests. As a non-authoritative DNS server, it is illegal (by all standards) for it to update DNS records, but this is one of the many things MS violated in W2K. I pity the ISP who has not put in the security measures to prevent this from happening.
They also ignore the SOA records in the DNS database, creating thier own proprietary record format.
What about IPv6? This is scary. Most Unixes have at least rudimentary support for IPv6. MS still has a TCP/IP stack that does not conform to the current IPv4 standard. I shudder to think what they are going to do to IPv6. The reason it worries me? MS has not participated in the IPv6 standards consortium.
Anyway,....most of what I talk about concerns the low level stuff, such as networking and development, which are primary concerns of mine. From an application viewpoint, MS wins hands down. You cannot argue with the fact there are more applications available for MS products than any other OS out there. This is truly where MS's strength lies.
If a significant number of applications become available for another OS, MS might find themselves in trouble. I can only hope.

------------------
Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.netskuzzy@applink.net