>>It's all a matter of personal opinion. .Net does alot for you.
>
>Visual Interdev "did a lot" ... I see no evidence of any significant market share.

VI was still too difficult.

>
>I don't know what makes you say that; SAP et al are deploying enterprise solution on the WWW ... without the benefit of .NET.

Most companies can't afford SAP.

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>And there's the "SanFrancisco" (Java) applications project running on Windows NT, OS/400, AIX, Sun Solaris and HP-UX.

I'm aware of it, but have never actually seen it. In what ways does it make web development easier?

>
>While everyone is building application components, MS is still working on the toolkit.

I think that's because the toolkits are still not up to snuff when compared to Windows development tools. .Net will take web development there.

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>>No, companies will chose the best solution they can afford. That may not always be the cheapest solution.
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>Which explains why there is such a high demand for VFP (programmers).
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>>IBM was terrible at marketing (and still is, IMO). The way they did things was to make the different model incompatable, so that when you outgrew your existing hardware, you had to replace all the software too.
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>In MS case, you outgrow the software, and replace the hardware in the process; same difference.

Not quite. With IBM, they sold both the hardware and the software.

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>(My P3-800 with 256MB already seems underpowered when I'm working with .NET).

.Net is still in beta 1 and has not been optimized. MS has promised big speed increases in the next release.