Does this sound like thumbing one's nose ?
In the Summer of 1997 my friend Randy Chapman invited me to interview at the Microsoft Internet Explorer for Solaris on the SPARC (because of my background in the Linux/SPARC port). I went to interview to Microsoft that summer and met both Randy Chapman and Nat Friedman for the first time in person. We had known for a long time from the LinuxNet IRC network.
At Microsoft I learned the truth about ActiveX and COM and I got very interested in it inmediately. Upon my return to Mexico Federico and I started to design a GUI control infrastructure for Unix that we code named `GNOME'.