From a hardware standpoint third party fitness trackers with full integration into iHealth and third party ear buds with the same (or better) features than airpods.
Part of the IBM settlement required them to document interoperability. That was used by the DoJ to force Microsoft to document their CIFS (distributed storage) and Active Directory (naming/policy) protocols.
The latter might be particularly instructive as my experience with CIFS when I worked at NetApp was the different ways that Microsoft worked to be "precisely" within the lines but to work against the intent. Documentation like "this bit of this word must always be '1'" Which as any engineer knows, if it really was always '1' then that bit didn't have to be in the protocol, so what did it do when it wasn't '1'?
Part of the IBM settlement required them to document interoperability. That was used by the DoJ to force Microsoft to document their CIFS (distributed storage) and Active Directory (naming/policy) protocols.
The latter might be particularly instructive as my experience with CIFS when I worked at NetApp was the different ways that Microsoft worked to be "precisely" within the lines but to work against the intent. Documentation like "this bit of this word must always be '1'" Which as any engineer knows, if it really was always '1' then that bit didn't have to be in the protocol, so what did it do when it wasn't '1'?