Microsoft is developing a new way for applications to communicate with each other and share files such as images or sound betwixt programs such as a photo editor or a sound editing application. A URL for instance can be automatically sent to Facebook or Twitter without the need to actually visit the Social Networking website. This sounds rather like the old OLE system in the older versions of Windows. That allowed exporting part of a document to another application but did not include sharing files with a Social Networking website, which could be used by malware authors to share a user’s data with another computer without their knowledge. This was apparently done years ago with the Amiga desktop computer, so it is hardly a new concept, just more bloat and features to create more security holes in Windows as if it does not have enough of them already. I am sure that Gnome had something like this where applications could communicate with each other. For example, editing an HTML document in GEDIT and viewing it in the Epiphany web browser, if you edited the document in Gedit and then saved it the Epiphany web browser would automatically refresh to show the changes. That is a good example of the interconnections between applications that the Gnome desktop could offer. The original Gnome desktop used this to good effect. http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus. Window surely is losing more and more market share to mobile devices like tablet computers running the Google Android operating system that is a closed system based on the Linux kernel, that must be why Windows 8 has the Metro tablet interface. The crew at Redmond are trying to capture the tablet PC market with the new interface instead of just trying to create a more secure and reliable desktop operating system. Linux has done that with their operating system it has a lot more security despite the recent attacks on the servers hosting the Linux kernel and the Linux Foundation.