Re: Transcript of MS Remedies

[Steve Cohen <stevecoh@mcs.com>]

I completely agree with development tools being a separate business, if
we're talking about splitting up Microsoft.

In a proposed split into OS vs. applications, on which side of the line do
development tools fall?  Is Visual Basic yet another "extension of the OS"
or yet another application?  There's no clean way to answer this question.

Development tools OUGHT to be about enabling developers to develop any
application they can imagine.  They may well be platform specific, depending
on the tool.  But the Microsoft model is skewed toward producing
applications that work together with Office, with Visual Basic, with the
whole slew of Microsoft applications.  They want developers to develop
products that work well with Office.  They don't want developers to develop
applications that work well with Office competitors.

Look at Visual C++ 5.0.  They have gone so far as to make extensions to the
core C++ language solely for the purpose of making it easier to do COM, OLE
Automation and all the rest of Microsoft technologies.  This is emphatically
NOT the spirit of the people who originally developed C++ and who
painstakingly tried over several years to iron out standards.

Development tools are a bridge between an OS and the applications that will
run on it.
Just as an OS vendor shouldn't have in interest in increasing sales of its
own applications, the makers of development tools should be making tools
that are most useful for developers, not to increase sales of one vendor's
OSs or one vendor's applications.

The Buck Family wrote:

> What about a remedies discussion of the seperation of development tools
> from both the core OS and application groups.  The OS is about resources
> and development tools give access to those resources.  If the OS and dev
> tool groups remain together they will continue to be a significant point
> for control of competition.
>
> Or maybe I just can't imagine MS in two pieces yet?