By enabling applications to both scale in capacity and provide non-stop availability, server-farms have played a major role in the rapid expansion of Web-based computing.
Those who rely on email aliases will also like that Microsoft has finally let us choose an SMTP server to send messages from non-Outlook addresses without revealing the true source -- we won't have to put up with "on behalf of" tags any longer.
He credited non-proprietary architecture, with its high rate of innovation and low cost, with helping break open the server market, once dominated by proprietary vendors such as Sun Microsystems Inc.