At 15:08 2000-06-07 -0700, Joseph T. Tannenbaum wrote:
>Are you sure? Who started the "computer age" or "information
>age" when you could exchange files with almost anyone.
You could do this with text long before Windows came along. Most folks
could read Lotus 123 spreadsheets with whatever software they were using.
Mosaic and Netscape lead the way to the popularity of HTML, GIF, and JPEG,
which, I submit, are even more universally readable than Word, Excel, or
Powerpoint files.
Microsoft, like most things, is not all [bad|good]. But they've reached a
point where the good they've done is being outweighed by the bad they do.
To use your file format example, a standard set of file formats is
definitely a good thing. But consumers do not have a single standard, even
if they use only Microsoft products. They have Office95, Office97, and
Office2000 formats. It used to be in Microsoft's interest to have a
standard format, but now that it's primary competition for MSOffice is old
versions of MSOffice, it's in Microsoft's interest to keep changing formats.
You're correct in that standards are good for consumers. But it's not in
Microsoft's interest to adhere to standards they don't control. They have
been changing formats with each iteration of their software and erecting
barriers to using backwards compatible formats. When I first installed
Office97, I had to go to the Microsoft site to download an add-on in order
to save Word documents in Office95 format. Now that I've set my default
format to RTF (to avoid macro viruses), I get prompted each time I try to
save a new document. That stupid paper clip keeps asking me if I really
want to use RTF, even though I deliberately set that in my options.
The standards we need now (and probably needed all along) are open
standards. HTML is good for what it's intended to do, but we need formats
for editable documents. Some variant of XML that's supported by lots of
free tools would be one good solution. It will need to be free (gratis and
libre) to become popular enough that the proprietary vendors will have to
support it to remain viable, in much the same way that proprietary email
vendors were forced to build good support for SMTP into their products.
> Why
>do you think the DOJ has a standard consisting of MS Windows
>and MS Office? This break up bears no good news for Linux or
>any other OS.
I disagree. Choices, real choices, are good for everyone in the long run.
It increases competition. The only possible problem is the lack of a
ubiquitous, non-proprietary, document format. We need an open standard that
companies will have to support. Otherwise we only get to choose between
several varieties of vendor lock-in. Of course, with competition in the
market, vendors will have to agree on a defacto standard at some point. No
one will be as dominant as Microsoft has been. Today's more interconnected
world will force them to use products that can talk to each other. That was
not as true in the 1980's when Microsoft first got started.
> It also means no good news for IT departments
>everywhere. I am not in love with MS. Never liked the idea of
>what you get is what they want you to get, and what you get is
>only half tested before you get it. I also didn't like paying
>premire support $150.00 to find out what THEY did to break my
>machines. BUT, all problems aside, we would not be knocking
>MS on the internet if it twern't for Bill.
Microsoft was dragged kicking and screaming to the Internet. Well, maybe
not screaming, but you get the point.
Their MSN service was established after I'd been using Eudora, Mosaic, and
Netscape with a local ISP for about two years. Netscape was the lead
browser and was very popular before MSIE even existed. Netscape's
popularity launched the Web, not MSIE's.
MSN did not support MIME or POP3 at first, even though these had been
Internet standards for a couple of years. Even AOL supported MIME
attachments at that time. Until recently, you could not use a standard POP3
client for MSN mail. Only Microsoft mail clients would work (that may still
be true, I don't have recent info).
I was using shareware Win3x web servers and FTP servers while NT4 was still
on the drawing board and IIS was just a marketing idea. The first Web
server I ever used on NT was a free server from a university in Europe that
ran on NT3.51. They had an SMTP/POP3 mail server too, since you couldn't
get those from Microsoft at the time.
The Internet was already making it possible to do things that just weren't
practical before. There were less people with computers back then, but
there were free, easy to use, graphical, browsers and mail clients back
then that supported HTTP, HTML, POP3, SMTP, MIME, FTP, and other standards
long before Microsoft decided to include these things in it's OS. People
generally got a full set of tools from their ISP. The Internet was coming
right along, well before Microsoft got involved.
The only thing that Microsoft did was take all the things that Internet
users were already using and distribute them with Windows instead of having
people download them separately. I'm sorry, I just don't see that as that
big of a deal. If Microsoft's licensing weren't so strict PC manufacturers
could have done the same thing. ISPs were already doing it on a smaller
scale. That's how Eudora got so popular. It was distributed by ISP's along
with Netscape Navigator because Netscape Mail had not yet been created.
Microsoft contributed, but they were not leaders when it came to the
Internet. They were followers.
Tony
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Linux: The choice of a GNU Generation.
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