If the hardware industry is pushing this standard the closed source OS people will not understand how to us the platform for a long time. Look at the 64bit platform, M$ still doesn't have a stable 64bit desktop. Most NIXs have 64bit in production, for a long time. I run FC3x64 on my Athlon 64 machine (screeming fast by the way) sense December. M$ XP64 was on it but nothing but 32bit apps are available and some don't run on XP64, the good ones anyway ;-) The only reason I shutdown the machine is because of thunder storms! M$ has an OS that is just to complex to change easily, to many dependencys scattered through out their entire system. You can't run Active Directory without their (M$) DNS, the logic is to get companies to move away from Bind and other DNS's. As a business move "someone" could say thats smart. I would say it's under handed not to work together, to make a network stable with a combination of products. M$ does not trust anyone with their source, so when it comes to making hardware work with M$ systems it will not happen, if the hardware industry holds the keys to the standard. Hardware manufactures will still need to get on the HCL for M$ OSs to get the standard accepted. If they don't the OSS community will need to pull together to make this a success (as is always the case). What ever happened to the LIM (Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft) memory standard (I know that dates me). The reason M$ OSs need to be restarted is they never stuck to the standard the hardware industry set. M$ wants everyone to use their standards, VB, .NET, C#, etc... Just my 2 bits. Sam.