How high will Microsoft fly? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly?

MSFT 478.53

-1.0%

Dec 12 9:30 AM EST

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To: RoseCampion who wrote (44785)	5/14/2000 11:05:00 AM
From: rudedog	of 74651

Rose - good post, but I think you missed the point of the MSFT position. True, toolbars had been a feature of a number of software packages for years before they were included in the Windows SDK by MSFT. Lots of different ideas about how toolbars should work, should be linked to underlying applets or context mechanisms, how they should look. Lots of developers (myself included) attempted to write to several of those. That meant that we had to determine if the support for the toolbar methods we used were included in whatever user environment we were targeting, and if not, how to get support into that environment. License the toolbar package from the original developer? Tried that - unfortunately a lot of the users had other toolbar methods already, and they didn't take kindly to either seeing their existing methods stepped on, or even learning to use different, incompatible methods. One of the best things that happened to the development of user interfaces for the Windows environment was the inclusion of many standardized methods in the Windows toolkit, which could them be assumed to be a part of the target environment. It did not mean that one could not build specialized methods on top of those - it just meant that one could write to a lowest common denominator with assurance that the end user would actually be able to run the stuff. What does a toolbar method for the MAC have to do with that? Nothing. Likewise I don't think there was some big market for toolbar applets which MSFT squashed. They just made it possible for a broad class of developers to make programs more usable and more consistent, for free, on any Windows platform. And I agree with MSFT that it would have been unlikely for even a minimum subset of that functionality to have been available if Office (where the toolbar technology came from) had been a different company than the OS company.

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