>Craig;
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>What is a “third party tool” in this case? How about competition from other software companies? I tend to think of "third party tools" as "add ons".

What Borland is doing is not and "add on". You will be able to purchase Delphi and use it instead of making any purchase of Microsoft developer tools. An "add on" would require a previous purchase.

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>Perhaps the perception is that Microsoft is always one step ahead but I tend to think of a few examples where this has not been true. DBase had some nice features I recall, Microsoft used the Watcom Complier for several years until they introduced their own, Borland C++ was more advanced than the Microsoft equivalent. FoxPro was more advanced than VB.

Define more advanced. While VFP is OOP and better at data than VB, VB is better at doing user interfaces. VC++ is much easier at doing COM than Borland C++ Builder.

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>On products go back a bit further – Word Star and Word Perfect as products were more popular than Word for several years. Netscape was a more popular Browser for several years than I.E. The list goes on.

WordStar and WordImperfect existed for years before Word came along. Netscape was also around before IE. At the risk of sounding like JVP, the arguement is a bit flawed.

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>Another aspect of Microsoft products has been to buy a company that has a developed product – a bit like Vivitar – a marketing company with a name. Microsoft bought FoxPro and many others. Think back ends – Sybase and the Sybase/Microsoft connection, and then there is Oracle.

What does this have to do with my statements in the previous post?

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>Microsoft attempts to lead users and developers in the direction of their “vision”. Some times as of late especially, that vision has not been clear. In the end I think if you took an item by item investigation of Microsoft by product and compared them to other competing products you would see that historically, Microsoft is and has not always been a leader.

I haven't been confused at all. While I agree that many products that compete with MS offerings may be easier to use or more technically advanced, that doesn't mean MS doesn't have good products (but not all of them. MS has produced some hideous bombs).

My point is that MS created the CLR. Parts of it were released into the "public domain" and were accepted as standards by certain groups. Microsoft will continue to enhance the CLR. It is possible that MS could add features to the CLR that the MS tools/languages will take advantage of, but competing development tools/languages will have to wait a rev or two.