>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.
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>It's easy to blame Microsoft for your business problems.

Of course there's a way. We're all still in business, aren't we? The ecosystem of software has now three major forces at play: Microsoft, Google and OpenSource. The rest of us have to find what they don't cover, or to find a way to carve a niche in their walls.

>Novell did it. WordPerfect did it. Netscape did it. In each of those cases, they had inferior products to what Microsoft offered.

In each of these cases Microsoft pulled a more or less dirty piece of a trick; and their products weren't inferior when they came in conflict with Microsoft. Microsoft changed the game on them. In the case of Word Perfect and Nescafe, the next version of their product was worse than the previous. In case of Novell, their networking was superior to MS's deep into mid-nineties, and probably still is. They had active directories nine years before Microsoft. The MS's clients for Novell networks, however, never played nice. Using Novell under W3.x or W9x was near nightmare, if you could get it to work. And MS's obfuscation, obscurity and other obstruction is my prime suspect.

All three companies panicked when they got hit by MS, and their products got nowhere.

This seems to be the recurring theme... this "easy to blame Microsoft for your business problems" - or other similar stuff, where the blame is solely on the resources it would take to prove the opponent's illegal moves. I wonder what would the history of capitalism look like if robbery was truly outlawed, to the point where any illegally earned cent was returned to the victim.