I was trying to explain to an IT Manager the little Iv'e learned about this stuff. His reaction was: "Will we still be able to run our DOS apps?"

Better make it 5-6 years.

>That should be long enough to decide what my next development language will be. Let's see.... Oz? Smalltalk? Forth? RPG-II? I know! Cobol!!!!
>
>This is a funny industry... Intel, who should've dropped 8080 (real mode) compatibility long ago, maintains it. MS, who should strive for backward compatibility does the opposite!
>
>This CLR thing... 2-3 years... Considering the timeframe I betcha MS is banking on a 4GHz CPU on every desk with 16GB of RAM and a 2.3TB Hard disk. Of course, Office 2002 (2004 won't be released until 2006) will probably take 1.5TB of hard disk and won't run acceptably fast until you upgrade to 32Gigs of RAM and a 6.5GHz cpu.
>
>;-) Alex