On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 01:30:37PM -0400, Thomas E. Dickey wrote: > Deliberately introducing design incompatibilities simply encourages people > to use other tools.
Then why's MS Office so popular? :-) Seriously, so can failing to introduce them, if the price of compatibility is to avoid making essential changes for the better. (I once read that a few decades back, companies like Zenith and Electrohome chose not to make solid-state TV sets, because they wanted to protect the demand for the output of their vacuum-tube plants. Japanese companies, lacking a domestic tube industry, were more willing to adopt the new, radically incompatible technology Of course we lost the tube industry after all ... and gave away the TV-set industry along with it.) I'm sure there are many examples on both sides, both in the software domain and otherwise. Which just goes to show, neither adapt-or-die nor compatibility-at-all-costs is a reasonable attitude. In practice, it's often a tradeoff. -- | | /\ |-_|/ > Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | / The acronym for "the powers that be" differs by only one letter from that for "the pointy-haired boss".
