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To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (22109)	12/11/1998 4:36:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

>>> It is a driver, not an application.> Tell that to the Trumpet Software Co. <<< I don't need to. They are engineers. They know what a driver is. Anyway, fact is, low level network protocols like ip and sockets are normally part of the OS. The only reason they weren't with Windows for a while is because: 1. MSFT was trying to sell IBM's nasty lame proprietary Netbuie/netbios solution as the only protocol, so they could fight the open networks movement and ream us all on the price of token ring and whatnot. For a long time they did not want to interoperate easily and cheaply with Sun or any Unix, and for that matter neither did Sun want to interoperate with Windows or Mac. MSFT/IBM suppressed tcp/ip, and Sun bought and killed Tops, both for the same reason. However, eventually they were forced to support it. This was largely due to government requirements to support it. (The consumers always wanted it, but they were intent on screwing them, I think.) 2. For a long time they didn't actually have the competence to produce a decent tcp/ip implementation. I forget when they bought that technology, but I do remember a long period of customer complaints and uncomfortable questions for them at conferences due to the lack of this feature, even after they had decided to do it. So, the little players filled a niche for a missing bit of the network OS for a while, then lost the niche. There were a lot of third parties that wanted that to happen, because they could not count on a consistent protocol suite to run their networked applications on, or to interface their hardware with. Jobs like that are jobs for the OS vendor. I suppose that is the classic idea of what should be in the OS. It is all the bits that both third party application and utility vendors, and third party hardware vendors need to interface to. The company layer in between the hardware vendors and the application vendors is the OS vendor, and they make features that meet the needs of those two groups. Anything that is 'integrated' into the OS that is not needed by these two groups is not really part of the OS in this formulation. The only exception would be if the OS vendor had decided that the third parties were irrelevant, in which case you have the argument that the OS vendor is too powerful. They are competing with the third parties via bundling, rather than being the honest middle layer they are relied on to be. This made a lot more sense than the wipeout of the word processing competitors, for instance. Or of the spreadsheet competitors, and so on. There was no industry impatiently waiting to be born because Word had not been shoved down our throats yet, AFAIK. Cheers, Chaz