Saturday, February 23, 2008

synchronicity strikes again

By strange coincidence, my previous post here fell on the very same day that Microsoft chose to issue another in a series of assurances that they will publish the APIs their own application software (Office) makes use of.

While it's true that if they follow through on this promise it will enable third-party software vendors to develop programs which work better and are more competitive with Microsoft's own products, it will also enable developers of Windows emulation environments (Wine and CrossOver) to remove the remaining barriers to running Windows applications without Windows.

Frankly, this is probably the greater concern for Microsoft, especially given that Vista has so far failed to supplant XP as "the standard". The existence of emulators that work every bit as well as Windows itself could further rigidify that standard, wrenching it from Microsoft's hands much as Microsoft wrested it away from IBM many years ago.

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