>Lately I’m noticing, with increasing frequency, Microsoft now has many applications that compete with my company’s applications. I see Microsoft has retail management software, wholesale and manufacturing software, etc… These are products with the Microsoft nametag (including but not limited to Dynamics, Navision, RMS, Great Plains, etc…).

Yeah, their growth has been flat for quite awhile now - in terms of their stock price - and they have to expand into other areas. Accounting is a good one. Lots of fragmentation. They buy one of the big guys, then start their same old tried-and-true routine of linking the product to the whole M$ software family - including the OS, I have no doubt - and saying how if you stay with any other product you'll be out in the cold. And incompatibilities between the M$ software family and the competing accounting products will magically materialize. They can plow money and marketing into the product and slowly consume the industry. But it's not glitzy, so it doesn't help the stock price as much as something like a Google-killing search technology would. They are a monopoly and they do have too much power in this industry.