Europe threatens Microsoft
Oh this is rich...Apparently Europe has warned Microsoft about all the features they are cramming into Vista.
One concern centered on the possibility that Vista would include features in its products that are already available separately from Microsoft and other companies, such as Internet search, digital rights management and software to create fixed document formats like PDF.
The other concern focused on whether Microsoft would fail to disclose all necessary technical information to third parties to make Vista interoperable with competing products.
Ok, so let me get this straight. Vista is going to make it easier to integrate all the PDF features, DRM, Internet search straight at the application level. Meaning it will be easier (cheaper) to greater richer applications that have complete integration capabilities for information. Vista is going to break the monopoly that Abode and other competitors have over the features and pricing of any component.
I recently used a third party .NET component for creating PDF applications. It was a well written library, but I quickly ran up to a limitation in what I wanted the application to do. I researched into it and found most of my "features" were not possible because of a limitation of Adobe. What choice do I have? Adobe has the monopoly on PDF creation.
The second concern I used to believe entirely on my rants towards Microsoft. They were always changing standards and not providing 100% backwards compatibility, basically screwing over Word Perfect, et al.
I have been in software for a while now, and if you have ever had to maintain legacy software while developing new software, you hate every single minute looking through old code. You curse it because as you are looking for your software patterns, you realize how horribly bad it is. OOP and the .NET Framework have taken off and have greatly simplified application development and Vista is going to continue that trend. I've always been able to find every piece of information about interoperability. For free.
I will give Java its due as it paved the way for features and enabled Microsoft to come out with .NET (C#) having learned mistakes from the Java Framework and build on top of its successes.