"David Schwartz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > "John Bokma" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >> Ok, let me spell it out for you: If all your applications are web >> based, and the OS shouldn't matter, why do Linux distributions >> matter? It doesn't matter which one you use to run, for example, >> OpenOffice. Yet people pick a certain distribution. Why? Well, one >> reason is that people like to belong to a group. So even if it really >> doesn't matter which OS you are going to use to access a web >> application, or even which browser, people will pick a certain >> browser, and a certain OS, just because. > > You don't get it. The point is, you can pick any Linux > distribution and > still use the same applications. This is exactly what Microsoft > *doesn't* want. They want applications to be locked to Microsoft OSes. > For then to do this, applications have to be as tied to the OS as > possible. The browser as a target platform threatened this Microsoft > vision, so Microsoft reacted by trying to corner the browser market > and balkanize Java.
And when are we going to see this browser as a target platform? > You can agree or disagree with the rationale and by sympathetic > with or > antagonistic to Microsoft's motive. But these are historical facts. No: the historical fact is that MS whiped Netscape of the planet. That you come up with "They were afraid that everybody would be running NS Office online using Netscape" is just a guess. MS just seems to ignore a certain development for some time, then state it's not significant, and next they are an important player. This is not limited to "MS missed the Internet, almost...". They don't miss anything, they just don't jump on every hype. -- John Small Perl scripts: http://johnbokma.com/perl/ Perl programmer available: http://castleamber.com/ I ploink googlegroups.com :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
