This discussion has me thinking about when businesses moved to Windows 3.x from DOS. To this day, I still don't really know why it happened. I don't think there were enough compelling business or technical reasons to justify the expense of the change. Most technical types I knew then didn't like it. I just remember reading magazines stating how all new development would be done in Windows. I thought "Why? What are they thinking? Who would want a system that brought my blazingly fast 286 to its knees and crashed every 10 minutes?" Nevertheless, it happened. Businesses spent a ton of money upgrading their systems to run Windows, and a lot of DOS developers eventually gave in because the businesses required it. So, why did it happen? Will the same forces play a part in .Net's fate?