How high will Microsoft fly? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly?

MSFT 510.37

+1.4%

Nov 14 9:30 AM EST

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To: mozek who wrote (13163)	12/13/1998 3:38:00 AM
From: Charles Tutt	Read Replies (3) of 74651

Under your view there is no such thing as "application" code; all code is either OS or potentially OS, depending on market driven decisions about how it is to be distributed. One can "integrate" anything and call it OS, and bits of the "integrated" code will of course be useful to other applications in the same class. A more principled division puts browsers squarely in the application category, IMHO, and this is obvious from the fact that even Microsoft has distributed IE as an application (even if you disagree w.r.t. Windows, consider that there is a Unix version of IE which nobody can claim is an integrated part of that OS). Suppose Microsoft for marketing or legal reasons decided Solitaire was henceforth to be an integrated part of the OS (rather than simply a bundled game application), and included an "integrated" "Solitaire API" in Windows 2000. That API could certainly be useful to me if I wanted to write a Solitaire-like game, and Solitaire could probably be made more faster and efficient if it had hooks directly into the OS (thereby benefiting consumers, or at least some of them). Under your thinking, would Solitaire then indeed be an integrated part of the OS? Why or why not? Where do YOU draw the line between application and OS? Or isn't there one? Instead of Solitaire, consider Quicken (which you call an application in your posting); suppose Microsoft decided to deal with Quicken once and for all and made Money an "integrated" part of Windows 2000. What would stop them? JMHO.

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