If not "Unix variant" then what would you call Linux then? Linux isn't the only Unix knock off, there are the purer variants, such as FreeBSD and related. If you're going to claim that the Windows NT kernel was VMS "stolen by David Culter" then it would be equally valid to say that Linus Torvalds stole MINIX from Andrew Tanenbaum. PS: Culter was the head of 20 folks from DEC to work on Windows NT, all of whom worked on VMS.

For many years now, MSFT's annual report has warned about the competative threat that Linux poses, including desktop, server and embedded platforms. There are several direct mentions of this in Microsoft's 2005 report, availble here: http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar05/staticversion/10k_fr_bus_06.html Old news.

When IE had much less market share than NS Navigator, there was less support (percentage-wise) for existing standards, specifically HTML 3.0 and 3.2. Microsoft led the way to get CSS and later, the DOM, adopted as W3C recommendations. Ever since IE earned it's dominant market share, subsequent versions become more and more compilant with more and more standards. The argument that IE is "bad" because it's standards support is slightly less than Opera or Firefox is ludicris. Real-world users don't choose browsers based on such arcane things such as the CSS boxing model and whether or not one browser does padding one way, or another.

Does somebody knows whether MSIE and MSN collaborate the same way?

Imagine what the uproar would be if IE and MSN Search implemented this feature first.