>>>Maybe someday most all of the really neat stuff will be standard! < yeah, right > ;)
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>>I've gotten most of my clients to agree that they'll standardize on IE and WSH in-house - the moves by NAI and Symantec to require IE4 or later to automate some of their web-based AV services cerainly didn't hurt my insistance that the same tools were required for broad features of my apps. Then showing how I could deliver functionality that was leveraged off the browser and WSH quickly for less money usually clinched theings.
>
>What size client base do you have? We have literally thousands. No way we can get them to agree on a minimum system configuration, let alone a "standard". No matter what we spec, someone *always* tries to "get by" with less. At least (most of) those customers don't stress the lack of performance once we point out to them what the minimum is.

I have clients ranging from a handful of PCs in a peer-to-peer environment, on up to one client that has literally over 6,000 stations at several hundred sites running the app I developed the install and software update application for. At some point, it becomes clear that some basic minimum configuration is required to be able to support the client reasonably; when we went to a requirement that the app run on Win95 initially, we lost a sizable fraction of the client base, but the small fraction lost represented a much greater cost of support for the product; eliminating Win32s as a supported platform literally reduced our support problems by 1/3rd. Requiring the application of current patches to Win95 including SP1 and the Y2K patch, and installation of IE4 to make Shell.Application available was the latest decision. In all, 12 of over 6,000 installed systems refused the installation of the required components. The cost of deployment far outweighed the lost revenue from the users who refused the current environment requirements.

It's a matter of what the cost of maintaining a few customers unwilling to install reasonable operating environments compares to the reduced cost and reliability gained by requiring the upgraded envirnoment. I don't always win the battle in the first round, but the cost of support and deployment makes my point for me eventually.