Right. That was the point: it is not enough to just understand how something was made. You have to be able to recreate it too. And building a similar system in just a bit different way to avoid potential copyright or patent claims is hard. If the system is complex, it is hard squared.
> it is not enough to just understand how something was made. You have to be able to recreate it too
I meant to include both in "reverse engineering".
What I was trying to say was that the large products where MS has failed spectacularly don't seem to me to be products from some other company that they reverse engineered. They seem to me to be products MS thought up itself. MS is better at co-opting ideas invented by others than at inventing its own.
