You're right to an extent Matro. But I think what deakie is referring to is that for all machines used around the world, particularly personal desktops, Microsoft has an 85% market share. That's a fact. Hence if I wanted to do substantial damage out there in the world of IT, I will write a virus for a Microsoft product, not a Corel product.
So 'hardly used' is relatively correct. It may be frequently used in many private sector offices you know of, but looking at the big picture, the Jamaican Government has MANY many many MANY more offices islandwide than all private sector companies combined. All of them use strictly Microsoft products. There was actually an exercise 2 or 3 years ago that ensured that all machines in Government were using MS products to have one standard across the board.
As a matter of fact, it is only after the Open Source and Linux Conference last Thursday that the Jamaican Gov't has officially resolved to ditch Microsoft products in favour of Open Source/Linux products. Come 2004, a mandate will be in place to change out all Gov't PCs to Linux. They've just come to the realisation that they can save millions of dollars per month that were being paid to microsoft by going the Linux / Open source route. ;D
So yes, right now, those products are still 'hardly used'. However the future looks bright for the Gov't as far as saving on expenditure is concerned. We're going Linux right across the board, eliminating MS products wherever possible, once and for all. Ofcourse this is going to be on a phased basis and it may well take a few years to wipe out MS across the board. So what they're planning to do is dual boot to get people used to the system before they wipe it out. There are just SO MANY machines to replace...... :-\
Even then, I still expect that there will still be a decent amount of dependency on MS. Do you have any idea how deeply rooted Microsoft's tentacles are planted in the world's business systems? >