John,

>You are right, we will gain nothing. If the DOJ gets it's way, MS will become two companies. One for OS, the other for applications. I'm unclear as to which would get Visual Studio and BackOffice (MTS is obvious; SQL Server is not).

BackOffice is specifically mentioned in the proposed order as being in the Applications Group. Visual Studio is not mentioned at all, but would probably fall also into the applications side.

Gates or Ballmer said in the past few days something to the effect that the DOJ is going to strip away the operating system business from us, leading me to believe that Microsoft will be the applications company and Windows would be spun off into something like "Windows, Inc." or eWindows.com. :-)

With so much DNA strategy built on OS services like MTS, COM+, MSMQ, etc., the development side would be at the mercy of the OS side, unless they developed their own version of services to sit on top of the OS. Where do you draw the line between OS and APP? Where does IIS fall, for instance? Where does VBScript belong? You could argue for both on that one.

Windows gets a perpetual license to use whatever IE version App develops, but not to add any features to it themselves.

>Either way, we're going to get some drift in direction. The Office folks will probably start hawking a Linux version; the Windows folks are going to have the tough time of it....my understanding is that sales of Office are what fund the massive R&D into COM, DNA, and future Windows. And where's big daddy to pay for MSDN, CaSA, and a score of other (assumed) marginal operations or money losers?

Good point. My guess is that Windows prices would have to edge upwards.

>Meanwhile, either way, MS will be under a strict order (appeal or not) of what they can do to innovate Windows for 3 years. Meaning AOL, RedHat, Sun, Corel, etc etc are laughing their a**es off because they can run rings around them.

That's the killer to me -- the possible handcuffs on development of new features in the OS. Will they have to get government approval to fix bugs in the COM+ subsystem or to bring out a new rev that allows new features on the application side, like Web Forms and Web Services? Oh yeah, the order says that the XML parser belongs to APP.

>Will VFP survive this? I would think so. OTOH, will our productivity survive it? Doubtful. It may be back to the bad old days when nothing worked well with nothing.

Don't forget that although the two companies would be prohibited from merging for 10 years, they are apparently *not* prohibited from doing business with each other or sharing intimate details of API's, etc -- the OS side just has to give to same access to everyone. Most likely outcome is that Windows development will stagnate and APP will build their own OS services as needed that can be tied to the OS.

I assume the company before the split would pre-arrange various alliances and cooperative initiatives that would be put into force the day after the split. MS does get to plan the entire separation, so I expect that each company would have great incentive to work cooperatively with each other and would have detailed plans already in place for the next several years.

I don't see anything in the proposal that would result in problems for VFP.