I believe his stats - but WHO are all these people using Windows Live Mail/Messenger, Azure, Windows 7, Windows server, etc? I have yet to meet one. Are these middle America and international markets?
I use Windows Live Messenger, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and will likely use Azure at some point (love the tech, but don't have anything for it yet). We exist.
I use MSN as long as most people I know still login to MSN even if they aren't using it as their primary chat. I use hotmail for a lot of my emailing mainly because I've been using it for 8 years, so everyone has the email and a hotmail account works quiet well for MSN/ windows live mail integration.
Not claiming they are the best tools out, just that they get the job done for me.
You haven't met people using windows 7? Moving away from the tech crowd pretty much everyone I know is using one of xp/vista or 7.
I'm in the UK, a lot of less sophisticated users use MSN chat and many still have hotmail accounts. I guess Microsoft is the default until you know about other alternatives.
Also number of people using Azure isn't the metric that's really interesting, a better metric would be something that shows how many server hours were bought in a way that you could compare with EC2.
I know Microsoft goes around university campuses trying to get students to use Azure for projects, and hand out a lot of test accounts in the process, inflating their numbers.
but WHO are all these people using Windows Live Mail/Messenger, Azure, Windows 7, Windows server, etc?
Guilty one here. While I use Windows 7, Windows server (multiple licenses) etc at home, I guess just Windows 7 is the norm for most people I know.
At work I can attest to having some hundred Windows Servers and not a single Linux box. As we were a consulting firm, we had lots of different customers but our focus-area was MS-tech. Ofcourse my numbers will be biased, but let me tell you: there are lots of Windows Servers out there. Lots. Sure some Linux-servers here and there as well, but Windows Servers are having pretty good days all in all.
As for Windows Live Mail... I dunno, I like gmail better.
As for Windows Live Messenger though... At first that seems like a really odd question to me, but really, it's not that special.
In my experience IM software is one of the categories of software with the highest geographically variation of any I've come across. In the US I hear people actually use AIM, which is entirely unheard of in the rest of the world. In Europe, you will find MSN is the status quo. In Australia Yahoo Messenger seems to be pretty big (or so it seems), but I've never seen anyone use it elsewhere.
The interesting thing about this kind of software is how it's not the software itself which is drawing users. It's who you can reach (ie, userbase). So if everyone in your area is using product X, it doesn't matter if product Y does everything ten times better, it will still be useless to you unless you can reach the userbase of product X.
Whoever gets users first wins (because who seriously bothers to run several IM applications?). And then it just seems to stay that way.
If I were to take my (severely) biased impression and generalize, I would say everyone is using every product from Microsoft, with the noteworthy exception of BizTalk. Linux can only be seen on netbooks or as a means of bypassing the corporate web-filter. Oracle does exist, but only in very few companies which rakes in billions. MySQL doesn't exist at all, except for in the bottom-tier web-hosting basket.
But I'm not going to do that, and I suggest you don't take (what I assume is) your Linux-hacker biased experiences and overgeneralise them either. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
