but WHO are all these people using Windows Live Mail/Messenger, Azure, Windows 7, Windows server, etc? Guilty one here. While I use Windows 7, Windows server (

but WHO are all these people using Windows Live Mail/Messenger, Azure, Windows 7, Windows server, etc? Guilty one here. While I use Windows 7, Windows server (multiple licenses) etc at home, I guess just Windows 7 is the norm for most people I know. At work I can attest to having some hundred Windows Servers and not a single Linux box. As we were a consulting firm, we had lots of different customers but our focus-area was MS-tech. Ofcourse my numbers will be biased, but let me tell you: there are lots of Windows Servers out there. Lots. Sure some Linux-servers here and there as well, but Windows Servers are having pretty good days all in all. As for Windows Live Mail... I dunno, I like gmail better. As for Windows Live Messenger though... At first that seems like a really odd question to me, but really, it's not that special. In my experience IM software is one of the categories of software with the highest geographically variation of any I've come across. In the US I hear people actually use AIM, which is entirely unheard of in the rest of the world. In Europe, you will find MSN is the status quo. In Australia Yahoo Messenger seems to be pretty big (or so it seems), but I've never seen anyone use it elsewhere. The interesting thing about this kind of software is how it's not the software itself which is drawing users. It's who you can reach (ie, userbase). So if everyone in your area is using product X, it doesn't matter if product Y does everything ten times better, it will still be useless to you unless you can reach the userbase of product X. Whoever gets users first wins (because who seriously bothers to run several IM applications?). And then it just seems to stay that way. If I were to take my (severely) biased impression and generalize, I would say everyone is using every product from Microsoft, with the noteworthy exception of BizTalk. Linux can only be seen on netbooks or as a means of bypassing the corporate web-filter. Oracle does exist, but only in very few companies which rakes in billions. MySQL doesn't exist at all, except for in the bottom-tier web-hosting basket. But I'm not going to do that, and I suggest you don't take (what I assume is) your Linux-hacker biased experiences and overgeneralise them either. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.