??? Why must everything depend on Stardock???
That's a very strange comment to me... Although Microsoft is indeed seeing that customizing and personalizing computers is becoming popular, and they adding more and more such features to the OS with every new release. Even so, there is only so much that one would reasonably expect them to do. Microsoft is a mass marketer. They don't try to satisfy every possible niche. The kinds of things that Object Desktop does is is the kind of niche that MS is happy to let Stardock have.
Also, retrofitting older OSes with new features is clearly against MS's revenue stream. They want you to buy XP. They still sell 2000 for now. But there is no point to them putting XP features, such as the new user interface capabilities, into 2000. What's their motivation? They have none. So, if anybody is going to add features to older OSes, its going to be people like Stardock.
