It hit me today that Applications have a lifecycle and ecology just like a living creature!  This hit me as I read Chris Sells’ log entries about Internet Explorer (http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/showTopic.aspx?ixTopic=1400 & http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/showTopic.aspx?ixTopic=1461).  An application starts out very rudimentary, but functional.  Then more and more features are added until the program seems bloated and not useful because it is so slow.  This obviously happened with IE.  Anyone who has done web development knows that IE is such a Jeckel and Hyde.  Some web pages can be wrong and missing markup tags everywhere and IE renders it fine.  Then there are a few things that you have to code special just for IE and that is a pain!  If Microsoft doesn’t even like their own products then how are we supposed to use them!  I think this is where Open source shines!  If Open Source Projects try to go head to head with MS then MS will always win.  They have so many developers and can crank things out so much faster.  So I hope that OS project leadership realize this and that there is something to be said for a program with a small footprint and that is very fast.  I love it when this happens then the product is redone (many times from the ground up) and is released lean and mean and then it starts the lifecycle all over again!  So far I think the Firefox and Open Office teams have done a great job!  The installs and footprints of the programs are much smaller than their MS counterparts.  These products contain most of the needed features and in some situations are much faster then IE and MS Office.  When MS acknowledges these projects by making feature comparisons and charts and speed tests the nature reaction is to try to make your product better and be better than MS in all aspects.  I hope these projects resist this temptation and take the comparisons and competition as a complement to the quality of their product!