Developing software is sometimes like digging a ditch, and sometimes like painting a picture. When it is the former, you win with power. When it is the latter, you win with talent. UI is mostly power, and computation is mostly talent. Thus, on the desktop, you win with money, and on the server you win with talent. Talent is like uranium - if you collect too much of it in one place, it explodes. Thus, a big company in most cases cannot safely manage a high concentration of talent, and, therefore, cannot produce a good server.
As far as survival in the brutal world of sofware is concerned, the secret is becoming your own UI as much as you can. The computation is provided to you generally for free, because the talent that produced it is anxious to share. If you are not willing or able to be your own UI, you will depend on a big company to do it for you, and that big company, be it Microsoft or Novell, will want some money for its services.
-- Sasha Pachev Create online surveys at http://www.surveyz.com/
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