>>But more importantly how about all the people out there like me who work for HR application providers? What happens to the folks on this forum that work for Abra or PeopleClick (Della Martin) when those companies cannot compete with MS for HR sales?
>>
>>Let's imagine for a minute that you own a fairly new company, less than 5 years old, and now you have between 50 - 100 employees. It's time for you to start thinking switching from that excell spreadsheet to a full blown HRIS solution. Do you go with Abra,Peopleclick,PeoeplTrack,!Trak-IT (just to name a few), or do you go with MS. Let's see, I think I'll take..... MS!!!!
>>
>>IMO, there should be alot of scared companies out there today.
>
>Rip,
>
>Great point. I work for a small software company and we compete with Great Plains and Sage. We developed the product using MS VFP and have an MS SQL Server version. Now we are supposed to compete directly with Microsoft? This is definately bad news for the MS developers. Thanks for the heads up.
>
>Kind Regards,
>
>Mat

mmm... don't know how bad it will get...
Microsoft is "cutting back" because W2K sales (hence Office 2K, etc...) aren't anywhere near their predictions and are trying to bolster revenue by onerous licensing and training schemes.

I just got a pamplet in the mail today from Borland, announcing Delphi 5.
They claim it is a VB clone that generates binaries from the same source code for either WinXX or Linux. Write your vertical market app and bundle the OS (infinite WS and server copies) with it free of charge. It's hard to compete against free.