Stardock Systems' DesktopX framework looks a bit like a piece of Microsoft's now-abandoned Cairo operating system project. Cairo was the project that absorbed many of Microsoft's best minds in the early 1990s. Now abandoned, it continues to have a totemic significance for some developers, who tote the name like garlic in front of a vampire to refute charges that Microsoft always steals and never innovates. Today Cairo looks bold, innovative and exciting, in the way that Microsoft.
Net sounds grimly familiar.
But memory plays tricks like that. Cairo was, in truth, never really that innovative, and was more a response to the market conditions of the time. WPS saw only a tiny amount of its potential realised, and the underlying System Object Model technology was abandoned amid much recrimination. But what was there was enough to whet users' appetites. Both Cairo and WPS involved superseding the little pictures on our desktops with useful active objects.