@anotherusername said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
I'm assuming that you can at least layer a mouse cursor on top of video even if you "smash it directly onto the screen".
The following has nothing whatsoever to do with the above, except that that brought to mind a an acquaintance told me about some years back.
He was an engineering student at the time, at one of the highest-ranking universities in the Netherlands, and as part of something he was working on, he regularly had to let a piece of software run on a bunch of experimental data. This software drew a window in the upper left corner of the desktop, taking up about a quarter of the screen, and put stuff into that window. Moving the mouse cursor over this window stood a good chance of corrupting the program’s output, because it apparently read the pixels on the screen as part of its calculations …