Microsoft is good at making products that are good enough and staying in the game for a long time. In 1990, high-end engineering users were very happy with the

Microsoft is good at making products that are good enough and staying in the game for a long time. In 1990, high-end engineering users were very happy with their Unix workstations. Windows NT in comparison kind of sucked -- but over time the suckage was not enough to justify paying $20,000 for a workstation versus $8k for a NT Workstation. Ditto SQL Server. Back when I was a newbie Informix DBA, my older colleagues laughed at people messing around with SQL Server. Informix was an awesome product in many ways, but cost like $40,000/cpu when SQL Server cost alot less. Who's laughing now?