>Several reasons. For one, if Office, Windows, and DevTools/Net are all separate, then we might have to contend with more incompatibilities than we do now. For two, all sorts of standards may no longer be standards.
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>I remember the bad old days where applications behaved differently depending on whether or not you were using MSDOS, PCDOS, DRDOS, CPM, MPM, TurboDOS, etc etc even though they all "looked" the same. Not to mention the horrors of PC compatibility vs. DOS compatibility......
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Gonz,

The prospect of potentially licensing Windows is a concern along the same lines. You'd end up with the same thing that you had with the various flavors of DOS. (Shudder!)