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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (44726)	5/11/2000 11:32:00 PM
From: mozek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

I think it is axiomatic that if the Microsoft applications bypass the published APIs, it is because they were not complete or efficient enough to do the required job Not necessarily. For example, a number of Windows applications (I believe apps from Microsoft may have been first in some cases) used undocumented internal data structures to do things like memory allocation or find system information that was, in fact, available through standard APIs. To the OS developers, this was a royal pain in the butt because we knew it was unnecessary, and yet we had to carefully preserve all sorts of offsets inside new Windows versions in order to maintain compatibility. All sorts of names were invented for the app developers that claimed their special undocumented access was necessary, often because it was the first solution they happened across or were told. I can also tell you that in our quest for app compatibility, we did not single out any manufacturer. We tried to maintain compatibility with every app that ran on a prior version of Windows regardless of how ridiculous their API use was. Gotta run for dinner... sorry if there are mistakes in the post above. Mike