They buttered you up, and said you were a wise man. You listened, and may have actually believed some of it. IBM is out there selling Websphere to my clientele. You lent credibility to their efforts. A little late for you to now start complaining about MSFT's gorilla tactics.
Ideas stand or fall on their own merits.
The author is almost incidental. You should have stayed away from Redmond. Regards, Dan Weese Dan, I like to think I factored all that in, and knew that when it came time to interop that we'd deal with these issues. Also most of the people we deal with at MS are engineers who probably don't know what's going on in the field. It's important that they read this perspective as well, they can help their company win because of the quality of their wares, not because of customers' fear.