This is presumably the genesis of several directives that resulted in derailing Vista (mentions "Blackcomb", currently the codename for W7, I guess, but were ev

This is presumably the genesis of several directives that resulted in derailing Vista (mentions "Blackcomb", currently the codename for W7, I guess, but were eventually targets for "Longhorn", now Vista, see: http://www.winsupersite.com/faq/longhorn.asp http://www.winsupersite.com/faq/longhorn.asp ), specifically the SQL FS, as part of Yukon. Ooops. You can see Mr. Gates struggling with positioning the OS as something more than a web browser, but seems to miss a point that (in retrospect, I suppose) seems pretty obvious to me: I want us to be able to construct rich UI easily simply by editing an XML document. I want us to be able to bind to XML data easily using the new forms environment. We have compatibility issues to consider with all of the above systems. Trident will be a piece of the solution as the HTML displayer but it will likely not be at the center of the system. This is the directive (I suspect) that resulted in XAML. The concept is great, I suppose, and would certainly be convenient for building business applications, but you can, crudely speaking, think of a web browser as a device that turns an XML (HTML) document into native labels, buttons and drop-down boxes. To reduce the [presentation layer of an] OS to the moral equivalent of a freebie competitor software seems counterproductive. I don't know what a better response would be, though. It's also interesting to note that most of the explicit technical directives (make a new graphics driver model: check -- vista) were met but one that would have arguably done the most to stem the migration away from Win32 applications to web applications was ignored, or bungled to the point of non-recognition: software distribution and reducing the barriers to entry for installing and using additional applications. It's so much easier to get semi-trustworthy binaries onto my Debian or FreeBSD (ignoring Fedora or Ubuntu because it's 2001 in this email) machines than onto anything Windows even in 2009. I suspect things would have been a lot different if they'd focused more effort on a site and delivery executables for application distribution and support, and then shipped them in the Windows Update suggested downloads area. Man I'm glad I don't have to defend an empire. Not saying it wouldn't have been nice to collect the taxes on one for a while though. :)