It's strange to think about now but Microsoft, the de facto market-leader for so many different types of enterprise applications, hasn't always had the stranglehold on business software that they do now. Think back a few years and you'll remember a time when dinosaurs like WordPerfect and Netscape walked the earth. Using their financial muscle, however, Microsoft managed to dispense of these competitors by offering free, discounted or bundled software. The company has received a few slaps on the wrist over the years for these sorts of practices, which have been deemed anti-competitive by some, but does anyone really expect the company to abandon a strategy that obviously works? To that end, eWeek points out that they're at it again, with Virtual PC 2007 (released yesterday). Microsoft certainly has deep enough pockets to sustain the financial losses involved with giving away products with huge R&D costs and it seems to work. But will free be enough to unseat entrenched virtualization vendors like VMware and Intuit?

For more on Virtual PC 2007:
- see this eWeek article [1]
- check out some Screenshots [2] of Virtual PC 2007
- and download Virtual PC 2007 at Microsoft's website [3]