Re: What if Microsoft never existed?

On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:45:24 GMT, "nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx"
<mygarbage2000@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 14:13:13 -0400, George Macdonald
><fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>...snip...
>>
>>And when M$ came along with an inferior product at a low-ball "competitive
>>upgrade" price for WP, SS etc., everybody fell for it and is now trapped in
>>the bowels of Office-hell... at extortionate prices with no support
>>whatsoever.
> This is arguable. MS Word 1.0 for Windows (3.x back then) was way
>better than then-dominant WordPerfect 5.? for DOS. WP stubbornly
>refused to port it to Windows, and relented only when MS Word was at
>6.0 (IIRC), and poised for grabbing more of remaining WP market share.
>Besides, the first attempt of WP on Windows was clumsy and buggy, even
>compared to MS Word. When Win95/Office95 came out, the fate of WP was
>sealed.

Arguable... yes! WP resisted Windows because it threw away a lot of the
value of their product, viz. the printer drivers... and left you with the
half-assed mess of Windows 3.x WYSIWYG printing as it stood at the time.
Windows 3.x itself was a buggy mess... M$ had the advantage of internal
knowledge of all its err, foibles. Oh and if you remember back to that
time, M$ had a few moments with some of their Office SRs: new .DLLs which
broke other software all over the place, including some M$ software.

Without the "competitive upgrade" scam I doubt that Word/Excel would have
had the success they eventually got.

> While I didn't have any experience with Lotus123, I heard similar
>stuff from the ones who jumped from 123 to Excel.
> If you say Borland Paradox, I'd agree with you. Pdoxwin 1.0 was a
>better-featured, easier to program product than MS Access 1.0 and even
>6.0. Yet bundling of Access into Office effectively killed Paradox.
>Why would somebody spend extra (don't remember the numbers, but
>standalone Paradox cost more than Office Pro) on a software product
>when a similar (even though inferior) thing is already available as a
>part of already purchased Office?

That's the standard M$ ploy: free trials and low-ball "competitive"
pricing... to get you hooked on their file formats, which they keep
changing... just to keep you on your toes... and break all the
"converters".:-)

>...more snip...
>>> Without the standard, the life of developers would be hell. I
>>>remember what a nightmare it was doing Javascript, let alone DHTML,
>>>when Netscape 4 was competing against IE4. These days, when Netscape
>>>is dead (OK, they still do releases, but largely based on Mozilla),
>>>and IE, Mozilla, and Opera all support the same DOM (OK, with some
>>>twists and proprietary additions and extensions, but the lowest common
>>>denominator isn't THAT low as it used to be), life is much easier.
>>
>>Netscape was *always* based on a Mozilla project - V4 just didn't do CSS,
>>and a couple of other things rarely used until IE came on the scene,
>>according to the standards. As for current current incompatibilities, they
>>are entirely at the feet of M$ -- go ahead and let 3rd parties plant
>>executable code, i.e. DLLs, on your system if you like, I prefer not to --
>>who just cannot resist the temptation to prorietarize a common industry
>>standard. They have tried with just about anything to do with networks and
>>computers - fortunately for us they were laughed out of IETF repeatedly...
>>until they wised up and employed a few guys who actually knew something
>>about networking.
>>
> Was it based on Mozilla or not, document.layers was a nightmare to
>code to comparing to document.all, and AFAIK the whole idea of layers
>died with 4.x. OK, Mozilla (and IE as well) has now getElementById.
>Not sure about internal IE implementation, but wouldn't be surprised
>if getElementById is just a stab function to document.all. As for
>CSS, it's one of most used tools in Web development(or is it just
>me?), and its partial implementation in Netscape4 sucked big time, to
>the extent it was hardly usable, if at all.

Yeah well Netscape4's design was apparently just unsuitable for a full CSS
implementation, which is why Mozilla made a right turn and followed the
Gecko project, which unfortunately got released before it was ready for
prime time. In the meantime, M$ had, in their usual style, glibly ignored
any attempts at standardisation and thought they could define methods which
would become the de facto standards. Hopefully that is behind us but we'll
see what the next IE brings.

>...more snip...
>>You'll be interested to know then that the next version of Office is going
>>to support .PDF natively. In fact there is a growing trend to banish .DOC
>>format from e-mails: send a .DOC attachment to a Massachusetts state govt.
>>office and it will be stripped at the entry mail-server. Expect this
>>policy to spread rapidly.
>>
> We'll see... But when Word will create/edit .pdf, it probably will
>be the death knell for Acrobat.

I'm not sure if it'll take .PDF input for editing - more likely just an
output conversion. When you think of all the damage caused by .DOC
transmissions/attachments, with its obvious potential for malicious
intrusion, the only conclusion can be that people who started to use it for
document exhange were too stupid to know any better; the people who did
know just got dragged along by the inertia... kinda sad really where the
LCD user leads the technology direction. This is how we end up with things
like the Winmail.dat ***-up.

One good thing: the .PDF feature means that M$ has actually acknowledged a
file extension invented by someone else; it always bothered me that an ISV
had no way of "registering" file extensions to guard against a future
hi-jack of same by M$... and they did at one time use .PDF for a different
purpose: Program Descriptor File IIRC.

--
Rgds, George Macdonald
.