It's also an illustration of one of the big problems that I think Microsoft is facing. The everything integrated into the operating system story sounds good, and from a particular view of system architecture makes sense. You move things that everybody uses down into a system layer so it can be leveraged. The problem comes when all the pieces become very dependent on each other. Now you can't ship IE without shipping parts X, Y, and Z from Longhorn. But those parts depend on A, B, and C which in turn depend on yet other parts. Pretty soon you reach the point where you can't ship IE without shipping Longhorn. Granted, I'm taking this to an extreme to make a point, but it seems to me that the integrated delivery strategy that Microsoft (and Sun in the J2SE, J2EE) has committed to is going to force them to go slower and slower, and to become less and less responsive to changes in the marketplace (you can see this very clearly in Java). When everything is tightly integrated, you need more communications between components (both human and code), you need more testing, you need more of everthing. And the stakes are higher because it's all or nothing. Seems to be an odd strategy for a company that's touting the benefits of loosely coupled web services.