Wait, now you're saying this ISN'T the issue?
If MS has nothing to gain by freezing out 3rd party developers, they sure invest a lot of time and effort doing it.
I'd have to agree with that, but I don't think that Microsoft will ever be the only software company left on earth, so I think we're ok.
Perhaps I'm naive, but I wish MS would concentrate on just providing a solid, reliable O/S core. Most of us have to buy it anyway, so the lack of CD burning, Media Player, Defrag, IE, etc... doesn't matter.
3rd parties have always provided better solutions anyway.
Win2000 is pretty reliable, and XP looks to be even more so. They're getting there. It's hard to be stable when you're providing support for so much hardware, and developing so much of your own stuff. If Linux tried to do the amount MS does (not talking about CD burning and such), it'd possibly be unstable too. I said possibly, not probably
I personally would love to see good solutions integrated into the OS, whether Microsoft made it or not. They need to open up Windows more, so we can see some true 3rd-party integration.
And 3rd-party solutions have not always been the best. I've liked IE better than Netscape since v3 of both. IE 2 just had the lovely feature of not being able to download a large file and browse the web at the same time (it took up the window), and it didn't look as good.
Besides, it's not the HDD space that's the problem, but every additional component installed and registered with Windows contributes to reduced performance.
Which is why you have the option to uninstall stuff like this. Media player, IE, etc.
Sorry for the long post.
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