Well, I'm not going to try and confirm or deny such a theory, but I can tell you that undocumented functions do exist, and they are being used in Microsoft applications. If you want to know what it is that they're hiding from you, this might be a good place to start looking.

Morphed standards
Java: preliminary injunction

Plaintiff's motions for preliminary injunctive relief based on 17 U.S.C. section 502 and section 17200 of the California Business and Professions Code were heard on September 8-10, 1998. The court has read the moving and responding papers, considered the witness testimony and heard the oral argument of counsel. For the reasons set forth below, the court grants in part plaintiff s motions for preliminary injunctive relief.

In a move that company detractors said is another sign of its infamous "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy, Microsoft has used an open Internet security standard in its Windows 2000 operating system and made modifications without openly documenting its changes.

The Web Standards Project, a two-year-old coalition of developers and users that promotes the use of standards in Web-page development, issued a sharply worded statement Monday accusing Microsoft of abandoning its promise to abide by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards in Internet Explorer 5.5, due to ship in a few months.

Kerberos is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard authentication and authorization mechanism. Ideally, a standards-based implementation of Kerberos allows for network or Internet-wide authentication and authorization regardless of the network operating system.

But Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos uses proprietary data, called a Privilege Access Certificate (PAC), in its Kerberos "tickets." The result is that tickets generated by third-party Kerberos servers, or Key Distribution Centers (KDC), are not valid to access Windows resources, such as files, applications or network devices, even though the KDCs are built around the same Kerberos Version 5 standard.

Slammed in a court brief for the proprietary way it implements the Kerberos Web security standard in Windows 2000, Microsoft (MSFT) has moved to reassure customers and disarm critics by publishing the formerly secret details of its version of Kerberos - just one day before the brief was filed.

Better late than never? Perhaps, but Microsoft has attached licensing restrictions to the site where the details are published, essentially locking down the information as a confidential "trade secret."

In other words, the information can be reviewed, but no competitor can exploit the published details in order to write code that could make use of it.

Microsoft to sabotage MP3 in XP

Microsoft, for example, plans to severely limit the quality of music that can be recorded as an MP3 file using software built into the next version of its personal-computer operating system, Windows XP. But music recorded in the Redmond, Wash., software company's own format, called Windows Media Audio, will sound clearer and require far less storage space on a computer.

Trained monkeys (certification churn and other hazards)
00-Apr ZDNet: The MCSE Blues

Robert Kile, executive director of the National Association of Communications Systems Engineers, sums up the anti-change MCSE viewpoint nicely when he says, "It's like buying a new BMW, paying for it and then having BMW take it back."

Others, however, deride recent MCSEs as being little more than Minesweeper Consultant/Solitaire Experts. They are eager, even gleeful, about a new test that, according to them, "will weed out the weak.