i must take *minor* issue with your criticism of wince.

the list will probably sigh, because i do this nearly *everytime* somebody 
bitches about it.

but i spent three+ years as a wince person at BSQUARE ( helped to write
the kernel debugger amoung other things ), so i have some fond memories of
it.

On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Chris Jones wrote:

> Windows CE bites!  You feel sick.  Windows CE bites!  You die...

wince is a pretty cool os in a lot of ways. from a CS guy perspective, it 
actually represented the first new thinking in a shipping OS ( really 
micro microkernel with core activities implemented in these hard to 
describe 'kernel adjuncts' called PSE's ( and PSE stands for different 
things depending on who you ask ). so, the graphics stuff is in one PSE, 
the userlib stuff is in another, etc.

it's relatively modular and consistent, *portable* at a level that 
appoaches (gasp dare i say it, unix!) and you can yank some stuff out. 

and, if you are a minimally competent win32 person, you can yank *mass* 
stuff out and just stub out all the things that the linker complains 
about.

so, it's a nice OS that CS guys can be proud of.

but, the CS guy perspective doesnt *sell* anything. :-)

so, lets move to the real world of software darwinism at good ol' M$FT.

mass more people at M$FT make a living off of the shipping cruftladen 
desktop thing. these people appropriately regarded wince as a threat, and 
they used their considerable skills to avoid being made redundant by 
wince.

so, considered on it's technical merits, wince 2.0 should have been the 
new *desktop* OS, with a new 'cruft compatibility' PSE added on for 
keeping Office functional ( cause that monstrosity is the cash cow! ).

but, that would have caused many people to eventually lose their jobs, and 
that wasnt going to happen.

so, the wince product management team continued to stuff their desktop OS
features onto teeny little boxes like the mobilepro and the palm sized
things, because being a PM at M$FT is about continuous product 
'improvement', tho a more accurate description would be continuous product 
growth :-)



-- 

John L. Utz III
john@utzweb.net

Idiocy is the Impulse Function in the Convolution of Life