As the chap from Microsoft wrote, I am not sure MS uses planned obsolescence any more than others (and perhaps less, as he suggests). The real problem with Microsoft (as with other vendors), as Stallman points out over and over again, is that they [typically] lock in your data.
As for the business community acquiescing, generally speaking, the only insight I can give you is from the IT organisations' perspective: (a) Exchange (Microsoft provides one of the more complete messaging platforms around), (b) FUD. During my last stint at the Labs, birthplace of Unix, there was unsurprisingly a lot of resistance to Windows, to the extent that non-technical administrative staff were being taught troff/nroff to write business letters. Now the situation is the opposite. No IT guy is going to get fired for recommending an MS platform, especially since dudes in suits are addicted to PowerPoint (the same ones now also addicted to Blackberrys, who once ridiculed people like me for being geeky because we use email, but today cannot live without it!) as if it were crack cocaine, and once you have to support and run that one platform, why create additional work? "Standardise" on that platform.
Don't believe me? Let me outline a scenario in a previous company: we were a team building a device that ran GNU/Linux and some proprietary software on top of that. The software developers were all *nix-heads, their target platform (as noted above) was GNU/Linux, and even the initial systems our device would connect to were *nix systems. Logical choice: software developers desktop systems were GNU/Linux systems.
Then we hired a new HW manager. During an "executive" meeting, he proclaims "I do not know of any other company that runs like this. We should all use Windows desktops". His [real] reason? He wants to manage his status tracking using some Excel stuff that he hacked up and he wants everyone to be able to send in their updates or what-have- you as Excel documents. What about the *nix needs of the developers? They would use virtual machines and remotely access one or two *nix servers set up for that purpose.
And this was at a company running on venture funding where you would think cost would have mattered!
Sorry for the rant... but it was good to get that off my chest ;-). And I came here to find people to have lunch with me and Chris. I might have just lost the Microsoft lovers!
--ravi