Nothing threatens Microsoft more than platform independence. I've been reading a lot about C# (C-sharp), Microsoft's new programming language. Many of the advantages of Java, but with all the native access to screw things up royally. Says this article:

"It's very different from Java," said David Lazar, a product manager at Microsoft, Redmond, Wash. "Java is trying to solve a different problem. [It] has applications running in different places. What customers really want is to get all of their applications running in one place, and this is what C# [enables them to do]."

And this "one place" is... Windows 2000. (Well, Microsoft's new .NET, actually, but you get the idea.) Why is it that whenever Microsoft says "what customers really want," it sounds more like something that Microsoft wants?