On a completely unrelated note, my definition of
Microsoft Everything has nothing to do with
E2. Microsoft Everything is that concept supposedly, you should be able to do everything you could possibly need to do using only Microsoft software, on your
Windows box.
But Matt, you're a rabid Mac user! you say, what the hell do you know about Windows? Well, I get the immense privlege of running Windows 2000 at work. (as my boss told me, in a pert, self-righteous tone, "everyone in the business world uses Windows.") One thing that always strikes me as amazing about Windows (I really, really, don't use much besides my Mac and occasionally X11 on my FreeBSD box) is how there seemingly is an "inner circle" of Microsoft apps. These apps can do amazing things. They can seem to move freely in spirit between their mortal shells. Explorer morphs into a web browser. The functionality of Word, Excel, Powerpoint suddenly appears within Internet Explorer. Word can imbed Excel. Powerpoint can embed Excel. Powerpoint can embed Word. And so on, and so on. It's almost like all the MS apps are one big, conglomate app, and all their various earthly incarnations are just tentacles of the beast.
3rd party apps, however, are left out in the cold. They cannot communicate with those of the inner circle. If you select the text of a URL and try dropping it into IE, well, not much will happen. Try the same thing on any version of MacOS post-7.0 or so, and you'll get some results. Also, try copying ANYTHING out of a DOS shell app (e.g., telnet) and NOTHING will happen. I mean, IE is far too arisocratic to tend with these peasant DOS apps. Zounds.
"If you can't do it with our programs, why would you want to do it?" is basically the attitude taken by Microsoft in their consumer-level version of Windows. They expect you to use Microsoft Everything. And they're not about to tell anyone the secrets to Windows programming, lest they have competing web browsers, Word processors, and so on.
Addendum: As far as
Windows games go, they don't really use the
GUI at any extent at all. They take over the screen and use
DirectX, which I'm sure
Microsoft is considerably more open about, since they don't really make much money from games, whereas the copious amount of
3rd party games for
DirectX is one of the things that lets
Windows hold its dominance over the
consumer desktop market.
privlege privlege privlege privlege privlege privlege privlege. Happy?