This sounds like Adobe's pound of flesh to me.

The question is, to what degree can Microsoft integrate what's on the operating system with the services it offers on the Web and avoid tripping over the antitrust issue? I think Microsoft is very sensitive to this.

Most new systems are shipping with 32 MB [of random access memory]. The investment in a Windows NT system begins to look substantially similar to the investment in a Windows 98 system.

This is the last hurrah for the current architecture. The next version of Microsoft's consumer operating system, Windows 2000, will be based on [a Windows] NT kernel. The business user transition from Windows 95 to NT Workstation is gradually emerging.

For instance, on a small business computer from Hewlett-Packard, the word 'Microsoft' may never appear on the screen.

They've really done a 180 on this. The new fix that they have in Beta right now for Outlook completely removes programmability except as manually authorized in each case by the user. And this will break, frankly, a large number of corporate applications, but for the general user this is the right thing to do.