Anyone with even the slightest inclination towards the technology behind software in the past few years would have noticed how Microsoft post-Win95 products have gradually stopped becoming (contrary to popular belief) monolithic apps and become more like little jigsaw pieces which become full-fledged apps when assembled together. For example, did you know that iexplore.exe, the primary executable for Internet Explorer 5, is less than 80kB in size? Kilobytes, not Megabytes. Much of IE’s rendering capability is in a 1MB file called shdocvw.dll which lives in your Windows\System directory. But any Windows app can use it, any many do: Lotus Notes, editors like EditPlus (see this screenshot — this is actually IE (3.0 or better required) running) to name but a few.

Ironically, for desktop and productivity apps at least, the least amount of code reuse and componentization comes from the Unix world. But Bonobo, a new initiative from the guys who brought you Gnome, promises that the Unix of the future will lead, not lag in the application space — in addition to the server space it occupies already.