A couple of weeks ago I attended a .NET tech conference with a couple dozen speakers. One thing that struck me was how many of them used Macbooks. The Windows hegemony is receding.

You are spot on about the emerging generation. My daughters are perfect examples. They have grown up in a world where Apple is the standard, not Microsoft. They are digitally attached to their iPods and iPhones. The iMac I bought on a whim and set up in the family area next to my office was used primarily by my younger daughter. It was disappeared into her room and is now known as Emily's Mac. Not long ago I said to her older spinster that it wasn't going off to college with her and Allie just laughed.

>Amen to stability.
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>In the meantime, IBM has surpassed MS's market cap: MS is now #3 in tech market cap (Apple/IBM/MS).
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>The biggest hit MS has had is the xBox 360: and now (or in a couple of days), MS will be giving them away to college students who purchase a computer worth $699 or more. Anything to keep them from buying a Mac for college (which on many campuses is the leading OS used by students).
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>Objective-C anyone? (Actually, if you can tolerate statically-typed languages, devs seem to like it as a development platform. But no, Charles, I have not entertained the idea of using Objective-C in my travels -- not for more than an evening. <s>)
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>Given where MS is now in the Enterprise radar (my information is that it's tolerated, far from required), the economic reasons for choosing .Net have declined along with MS's market cap. And economic reasons were the driving force in my decision, or non-decision, all along. VFP.Net was an obvious winner at the time (but itself came up short). Boo, which anticipated the strong tyoe inference of F# by 4 or 5 years (and which was the basis of the VFP.Net effort), like VFP.Net, gave the best of both (development productivity and .Net resources) worlds. But now, the world has changed, as much due to Javascript JIT enhancements as anything else, as JR points out.
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>Python was a non-starter in terms of UI: but with mobile UI now powered by the JS JIT (and shortly by the Pypy JIT), and a UI framework with a hundred developers and 10's of thousand of testers (Google Web Toolkit) able to be used with Python (through Pyjamas), there is now a viable alternative for business app development. And that alternative has stability. There will be at least two other alternatives using Python (Lianja; and QT Quick), so there's no issue of lock-in.
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>Short story: stability is good. The question is where to find that stability. Given that Mono is a requirement for .Net to succeed and is now in flux, given that MS's mobile story is still weak, given that college students are moving to Macs at a rate far greater than the general population (and today's report that Mac use in corporations is growing beyond expectation), given that the results of MS's mis-steps are reflected in market cap, there's a real question whether .Net/MS represents the stability we all seek.
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>Hank
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>>>>OK, but IBM's competitors were comparatively weak with less credible support/education channels and lower build standards. That's not what MS is facing.
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>>Yes, that's an excellent point. IBM had no serious competitors with the technical and financial scale of Google or Apple.
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>>However, MS shares another advantage that IBM had with the business world- a huge installed base with a vested interest in IBM's success (mainframers like me.)
>>Anything with those 3 blue letters on it was much easier to sell to business clients, so we stayed with IBM wherever possible.
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>>My life and the lives of my clients would be a lot simpler if we could stay in a familiar tech world as things evolve, so our bias will naturally be toward MS and the usurpers will have a steeper hill to climb.