Simon Fell > Its just code > closing in

I think now more than ever, Microsoft's competition is closing in on area's that MSFT has in the past been way ahead of everyone else. For example, development IDE's, for a long time Visual Studio was way ahead of anything else, but now Eclipse gives it a serious run for its money, I find there are features in Eclipse that I miss when I switch back to VS.NET, and that it makes me a more productive Java programmer than VS.NET makes me a C# programmer (although I find the CLR's BCL to be more productive than the Java 1.4 class library). Hardware support is another area where MSFT's has always lead, but now, I'm scrambling around downloading drivers so I can install Win2003, whilst RedHat8 had all the drivers I needed bundled in, and the RH8 Install is as painless as any Windows Install I've done.