>FWIW, I do not agree with this statement. I don't see a retrenchment in e-business. I see a bunch of dotcom startups with shaky business models going under. I see some perhaps overly broad initiatives being rethought. And of course, as we enter an economic slowdown many have to adjust. But I see nothing but accelerating interest in businesses taking advantage of the Web. E-business is here to stay.

Hi Robert - that's not exactly what I see, but let me explain below.

>I agree that adoption will no doubt be slower than we want <bg>, but I completely disagree that we misread the market need/demand for what we are doing.

Let me first say (as I later explained somewhere) that "misread" is not the correct term. I think that you read perfectly *when* you read, and you read the market as well as anyone could have. The events that have since transpired were totally beyond anyone's tea-leaves, however. We all knew the emarket was overvalued, but not that the general economy would slow or that retail customer web-use would stagnate so quickly.

Then, I will add that my perspective is only from inside the federal gov't and the surrounding private-sector interactions (aside from general media news, which strongly supports my argument, in this region, at least). We are bigtime Microsoft customers here. Your products are our overwhelming standards, and we like you, despite DOJ efforts < bg >

But the web business has largely come and gone in the gov't (and we have a tremendous impact on the local economy - we employ a lot of contractors besides our own tech people).

Every agency wanted desperately to get a good public website up, and a good intranet up (and perhaps join an extranet). Okay, by-and-large these sites are up now, and there really is little more to do for quite some time besides maintenace and minor enhancements at most agencies. The big push is basically over here.

We have tested a possible web environment for our major gov't production systems, and it doesn't cut it at all, at least not for now, the technical and security issues overwhelm the idea. It's not going to happen, for an indefinite period, while technology improves.

So I don't speak for your entire customer base by any means, but I do get enough perspective to see a good chunk of the market, possibly enough to make a difference. Other than this, I will certainly admit that your knowledge of .NET and the web future overall is quite superior to mine. I agree the web is here to stay (and I'm as big an advocate as anyone), but there may be enough slowdown for a long enough period to impact .NET, from my corner of the world.