>A few years ago, a letter of mine was printed in LAN Times magazine (RIP) that pointed out that while the price of hardware was falling steadily, the price of Windows was rising steadily. I suggested that this economic anomaly was due to MS monopoly power.
>
>The latest PC Week reports an advance notice from MS on Windows 2000 pricing which give $319 for the price of Windows 2000 Professional. Picking up a catalog for WWW.TIGERDIRECT.COM I see a Win98 system for $450 (233 mhz Pentium MMX, 32MB, etc.).
>
>Consider a clone manufacturer that wants to retail a W2K machine for $400 sometime next year. What is their manufacturing cost? $300, $200, $150? How much of that goes for W2K? 50%? 75%? 110%?
>
>See what I mean about reaching the point of absurdity?
>

No one is holding a gun to your head saying you have to run Win2K. NT 4 will continue to be sold and supported when WIn2K ships. There will be an additional member of the Win9x family, Millenium, shipping sometime next year, and Win98 is still a viable, if in many cases unattractive, alternative.

You can always stop using MS-platform-only tools and go write for Linux, or MacOS - finding clients may be problematic, but, hey, you won't have to buy Win2K...