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Plus I've had Microsoft hosted Exchange for almost 2 years now and can't remember a single outage.

I call bullshit. I have had BPOS with my company for almost a year and have experienced several outages (I am keeping track because this was upper managments call against the advice of IT):

22 June 2011
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/microsoft-confirms-bpos-cloud-outage
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/23/bpos_outage/

10-13 May 2011
http://www.katacinta.net/cinta/microsoft-online-outage-may-10/
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/386384/outage_hits_hosted_exchange_customers/
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/hosted-exchange-customers-hit-service-outages-981
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216697/Microsoft_explains_recent_hosted_e_mail_outages

6 March 2011:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onlineservicesexchange/thread/7017abf4-a9d9-4c08-85ac-f66912124493/
19 October 2010
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onlineservicesannouncements/thread/e72e8707-7457-4737-b246-2598769e54cf/
3 & 7 September 2010 & 23 Aug 2010
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-bpos-down-for-90-minutes-second-outage-in-a-month/7302
http://mcpmag.com/articles/2010/09/10/microsoft-reports-major-bpos-outages-slas-affected.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/09/08/meeting-your-and-our-own-expectations.aspx
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-apologizes-for-spate-of-recent-online-services-outages/7337

Microsoft has said publicly that they pay 2x more into the patent pool for licenses then they get out for royalities.

See here: http://mcpmag.com/articles/2010/05/03/microsoft-h264-support-not-about-royalties.aspx

> And how often have we heard rumours of WinFS appearing in the next Windows OS?

Ever since Jim Allchin Microsoft announced Project Cairo in 1991. It was scheduled for release in 1994, and it was to include an object oriented file system similar to what is now referred to as WinFS. Now, 15 years later, these capabilities are STILL missing in action. Here's a chart showing Microsoft scheduled and actual ship dates.

Of course, in the mean time Microsoft has been chasing other innovations and their ever expanding appetites ever since that announcement...Internet connectivity and its related clients (www, mail, ftp, nntp...), security, improving stability, not to mention all the kinds of new hardware devices that had to be supported. Many of them were first supported by Windows.

Nonetheless, WinFS is one of the most obvious cases of Microsoft having "dropped the ball."

They dress better, but they get paid less.

http://mcpmag.com/salarysurveys/2005/charts/chart4 .aspx

~

It would appear that the person on the most recent cover has a flashlight shining out the top of his pants.

Preaching to the choir would be running those ads here.

• Unix systems are inflexible
• Unix requires you to pay for expensive experts
  
• Unix makes you struggle with a server environment that's more complex than ever
  

In short retort:

• Unix flavors run my TiVo, my Powerbook, Google.com, and this web site. That's pretty flexible to me. NT Webservers in places I've worked have to be completely rebuilt on a regular schedule to address 'creep' problems that will otherwise bring the machine to a crawl, if not a blue screen of death.
• Unix requires you to know what you're doing, or to use tools created by other people. You can always hire an expert, but you're more likely to find a good one for less money than someone who's still trying to pay off their credit cards from the 6 months or more they took off work to get their Microsoft Certification credential. An MCSD credential means you can make bank consulting, and naturally Microsoft pushes employers to use only Microsoft Certified Engineers, so Microsoft's accusing Unix of requiring expensive professionals is a bit of hypocracy.
• Finally, the Windows server environment is quite complex, nowhere near as modular as Unix systems, and gets more complex with each version. Also, since it's a single-vendor solution, if you don't like the way a product's development is headed, it's tough luck, or you can change systems entirely. Unix has flavors, and as they evolve, you can easily port from one to another that better suits your needs (from Solaris to Linux, for example).

It's all about the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and Microsoft's firm belief that the decision makers in a company are the ones in air so rarified as to know little enough about technology to be brought in to Microsoft's folds by this bunch of crap.