On the other hand there are areas where they have always been the leader such as enterprise manageability or .net.
I was gonna leave that one in bold alone... but in the interest of increasing my post count up, since that seems to make one take you more seriously here at ATF... I will make a comment.
What kind of leading do they do with .Net? Last time I checked there were more JAVA developers and less interest in .NET ever growing in the IT realm.
ASP.NET hasn't taken off like it could/should. IIS 6.0 as a server is great but ASP is lackluster compared to its competitors. They have taken the easy out of it. Their market was driven by 'get er done' IT staff in VS6 and now its a 'get this phase done so that we can procede to step 2 in 4 months' product staff. Leaders? This is the typical JAVA mentality. They don't lead that market. I would like to see some numbers of how many IIS 6 and C# deployments are out there vs JAVA/JBOSS and BEA deployments.
I also have issue with their rollout of products.
Example:
I am writing financial software for a federal government department in a State funded research facility. Needless to say this is a WIERD accounting system. They are a windows shop exept for the webserver. I was brought on as a web developer / database expert. The department that encumbers our IT overhead has .NET servers running from IIS 5.0 and SQL Server 2000. I have full access to these resources for the project I am developing. I started off doing this project in .NET. Afterall, lets be real, .NET isn't that bad of tech especially if your a windows shop. Doing my reasearch I found that the .NET Framework 2.0 had features I wanted but wouldn't be out for months. I saw that changes were being made in the system that would severly affect how our application would run. Not only that, but the SQL Server 2005 would render a good deal of my base useless. Triggers, Stored Procedures might not port over since they would need work arounds to the limitations. Visual Studio 2005 would render my current copy antiquated, even at 3 months old. So what I had to look forward to is that the SO-CALLED Rapid Application Development that windows platform waves like a banner, would indeed set more work on my plate.
Not that I don't think microsoft is making strides in the market. I just feel they have made too many strides too soon and are segmenting their systems to soak the wallets and increase dependance. While I have peers that use .NET for systems and am quite at home in ASP.NET as well as JSP, I think this 'all at once' rollout plan is a bit needless. It makes for good marketing but I like long transistion periods between several products that comprise a suite that build the way we do business. Being a part of MSDN doesn't cut it as I am not staffed to be research and development for products. My product won't have priority for conversion by the guys who have the MSDN and MSCE keychains in the IT overhead. How many stories are like mine? Lots infact if you go to the local Linux User Group, made up of many .NET and JAVA developers (mono and jboss are godsends there). We aren't some po'dunk USA town either. ( Think University of Florida ) (Think Robert Love's old stomping ground ) (Think One of the biggest MS Campus sites in America ) Locals as well as University staff have very similar stories.
PS...
My application is running fine on our 'newish' Intranet server that runs Gentoo, mysql, php and apache 2.0. All user policies and permissions for the Gentoo box run through the AD. Soon it will be migrated to 'newer' server RHES 4.0 running php5, apache 2.0, mysql 5 and SELinux without any code changes. Can't say I would have the same experience with the Microsoft route.