It's that way in *any* industry. The big guy will always have more money for advertising and sales and the name recognition. A friend of mine had a CRM system written in VFP. Microsoft came out with their CRM. Salesforce.com has theirs. Instead of rolling over and playing dead or screaming and yelling that it was unfair, he found a way to keep selling his product. He found an untouched niche market and tailored his software for it.

It's easy to blame Microsoft for your business problems. Novell did it. WordPerfect did it. Netscape did it. In each of those cases, they had inferior products to what Microsoft offered.

>Actually the game is the same for other users of Microsoft's development tools. Just imagine that for a while you have their support and even showcase your app in some partnership program or whatever (such things existed, but I have a knack for never knowing exactly what buzzwords were de rigeur in Redmond at the time, or today)... and then the new generation of the tools comes out. You invest a considerable sum of money on buying these tools - server this and management that, builder this and that sharp, drawback one. You invest in learning - your best guys invest a lot of time and effort to just learn how to hit the same nails with the new hammer, drawback two. You then start your months of migration of your product - drawback three, you don't develop new stuff, not much, you are migrating, hoping that once you get at the other end, you'll have everything done with the shiny new tool which will make your team so much more productive, and as a plus, your product will look sexier and
>sell better.
>
>Then, just a few miles before the goal, you discover that M$ has a product competing with yours. They didn't have to migrate or learn. They had the knowledge from the get go, and they saw your app - they showcased it, remember? You actually had to prove it was a big success to have it showcased, so you've done their marketing research for them before even starting down this path.
>
>Nice system, though. You and Microsoft have the same chances in the market. Except they can afford to sell their competitor to your product for peanuts, until you're left with just enough to buy a rope.