>>But it was already done at least twice (eTecnologia and Christof), even though these projects weren't exactly finished - but, hey, these were small outfits or a single person. Microsoft could have done the same - they could just save as much money on lawyers or advertising in a day and invest some manpower into development instead. They just didn't want to do it.
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>You say they didn't FINISHED... :)
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>If they would be finished, what about fatal bugs or performance issues???

Hey, it's software, it is never finished :). In this context, "finished" would mean that it's feature complete, i.e. nothing serious missing, or that the missing parts would be simple to work around. Also, that there aren't any critical bugs. That, by itself, is far ahead of any of M$'s version 1.0 of anything :).

Performance? Not critical nowadays. The hardware is strong enough that if you aren't using the latest visual gadgetry and haven't done anything really stupid, your app will be fast enough.