Hi Andy,

I hope I didn't miss the main point of the article with my previous post. Most of us have jobs because our employers and customers want new stuff. If my only job were to keep old programs running, I would be a 'technician' rather than a 'developer'. If Microsoft doesn't add new features to releases, their market share will diminish. And SQL Server has much more right about it than questionable.

Having said all that, I think that the folks in marketing at Microsoft should be concerned about their 'brand'. Microsoft as an entity is starting to have a reputation in some circles of putting out software before it's ready. This is a shame, because those of us who work with individual products such as SQL Server know that it's overall a good package and that there are lots of good business reasons to purchase it over its competitors.

We need to be careful about applying terms like "customer loyalty" to database packages because in the real world a company buys one and is forced to stick with it for a long time whether they feel they made a good decision or not. We techies may have an attachment to our tools, but if there are too many CIOs sitting in the country club quietly grousing to their buddies about how much they regret purchasing a certain software package, new sales will diminish. Right now, the buzz in many of the corporate watering holes is "don't buy Microsoft until SP1". Maybe that's a shame, but it's something Microsoft should think about. Likely, they are...