You made his point again. In the golden Microsoft years, Exchange, SQL, SMS, etc all sucked. Really sucked. But you needed to take your medicine (aka buy the Windows platform), because the oxygen was snuffed out from the alternatives.
Today, the tools are keeping folks on the platform. That's dangerous to Microsoft's well being.
Bubbles like this have a way of collapsing so damned quickly.
I remember when Novell had an absolute lock on server software, the alternatives were all jokes, and yet one day they'd completely disappeared from the landscape, not a single server remained.
When people jumped to NT, or scrambled to Linux, there wasn't much time to respond.
What killed Novell was that their product was perhaps too good, it was frighteningly fast and extremely durable even under the worst conditions, but not good enough because it couldn't run general purpose applications like the other OS options could. Like you say, the only thing keeping them there was file sharing and when people moved past file sharing and on to other things, they were dead in the water.
What will make Microsoft disappear is the industry moving beyond email and groupware and "office apps" and instead to something else. What that is, maybe we just don't know yet.
> but not good enough because it couldn't run general purpose applications like the other OS options could.
I remember wrestling with BTreive settings on a client's NW 3.1.1 server to make Solomon (their accounting software) play nicely with ArcServe (the backup software). There's something I'm glad to not have thought of in years.
Today, the tools are keeping folks on the platform. That's dangerous to Microsoft's well being.