Slashdot Mirror
The War Of The Word
atari_kid writes "For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees. And even some of their high level managers have their own blog like Chris Pratley, a group program manager (GPM) for Word2002 (OfficeXP) project. Mr. Pratley just blogged on his 'personal philosophical' conversion from a Mac geek to a Microsoft devotee & his interesting perspective on the 'Word Processor' wars of the mid-90's and why Microsoft won."
OpenOffice Writer is a non-localized piece of crap taking up megabytes of space and memory and missing such simple functionality as embedding multimedia or animations into your documents.
Bob is a close runner-up.
It's always good to have high hopes, but in this case I'm afraid you'll have to get used to disappointment. Here we come!
My site: Free Nature Pictures
looks like some one wasted his mod points MAHAHAHA
i guess it must be difficult read a blog which starts word to read any entry.
Sorry, couldn't resist ;-)
Martin
The best Microsoft employee blog is the Old New Thing. I don't think you'd get far arguing your anti-Microsoft points with Raymond.
We forgive you. We don't have type 11 errors anymore. You can come back to the Mac any time you want. *opens arms* You sound like you need a hug.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
He admired Apple for its elegance and derided MS for its substandard products; he was rejected by Apple, but offered a job at MS.
Ouch.
It should be said that later, he comes to terms with MS not necessarily on the grounds that they make good product, but that they are a good business. Funny, that.
Glog!
MicroSoft won the Word (editor) war?
Guess we better let OpenOffice.org and Star Office know right away!
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
One key point left out of the blog regarding WP's success: WP offered unlimited, toll-free technical support at the outset. It was very comforting to know that you could call someone who actually understood the program to answer a question. WP built up a lot of goodwill on that basis.
That ain't liver; that's beef kidney!
Until printers can print animated printouts, I'll be happy with word processor programs that don't embed movies or music in documents. (in fact, after the fiasco of Clippy, I don't want ANYTHING animated in the presence of my word processor documents!)
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You slashdotted microsoft. Another tiny web site bites the dust. I hope you feel proud of yourselves.
Of course... don't listen to me... I'm a Republican
I'll take you to the ball, Barbara Manitee!!!
...not only do the completely uneducated (like myself, or slashdot) get to spout off incorrect information they heard from a friend of a guy they met somewhere but also the really bad people can blow smoke up each other's arses too...
Next thing you know, Ken Lay and Dick Cheney will have a blog about how their hearts are breaking for the poor unemployed, oppressed everyday Joe... and people will buy it because hey, it's on a blog.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Does he actually do any work or just write his blog?
I still keep Word Perfect 5.1 on my 386-SX based Toshiba notebook. Notebook and word processor run just fine, and to this day would meet 99% of my needs if I didn't have to exchange documents with others (meaning they send me MSWord files).
I remember when WP succeeded because they supported a wide variety of hardware, and most every printer in existence -- unlike anyone else at the time.
And when they failed by not forseeing the quick move to MSWindows 3.0 and above.
Those were the days. What days? The days when there was still compeition in our industry.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"In the period 1992-1994, Word wiped the floor with WordPerfect in reviews, winning just about all of them. "
Excuse my tinfoil hat, but wasn't that about the time that Windows finally stopped sucking utterly, and became a tool that everyone, including PHBs, could use? Isn't this the era of PC Magazine, and John Dvorak, and everyone's grandmother getting a PC?
Word was never technically superior, it merely appealed to a broader (and simpler) audience. There is a difference. Word won because it got reviews from trade rags. Word won due to a cultural shift - where document presentation became more important than its content, where a document's formatting is more important than its timely production. Word is the Guardent of word processors.
In answer to the folks who claim WP was a lousy product, I have two words: Reveal Codes.
I only jumped to Word97 from PC Word 5, then only because it was a 32bit app. By then, WP was dead and buried. I made the jump to Word2000 at work, then to OOo, which I use under the radar to publish all of my documents, typically via PDF.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
...isn't used.
For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees.
Eh now?
It is rather easy to sum things up. Word and other Microsoft programs won for two reasons. Lotus 1-2-3 was kicked out because it took them one year longer than Microsoft to get the Windows version out (thanks to Microsoft having access to the Windows internals and being able to use undocumented functions) With word it was a different issue, it was more or less because Word basically was warezed left and right and even being an absymal product compared to Word perfect at that time, everybody including the neighbour of everybody had it at that time. Lots of Microsoft products got their access into companies that way, via the private warezing and forcing the bossed to buy the stuff the employess were used at home.
I guess getting OEMs to pre-install Office and not other products can only have helped Microsoft.
1. Microsoft bloggers are very enthusiatic about Microsoft.
2. If you get turned down for a job at Apple you might not like the computers so much any more.
3. Asian versions of software are complicated.
4. Microsoft puts out crappy products at first and then listens to customers to improve them.
5. Other companies make mistakes and Microsoft almost always takes advantage of the situation.
6. Having a huge monopoly in operating systems and file formats gives Bill Gates a huge erection. I swear you can see it during meetings.
(Okay I made up that last one.)
The Word planning team discovered that the WordPerfect sales force was going around to customers and showing Word opening a complex WordPerfect file (printer.tst) to show how bad the conversion was, and therefore how pointless it would be to try to switch to Word. So the Word team organized a special dev team that focused entirely on WordPerfect document import, "reverse-engineering" the WordPerfect file format (documentation for which was jealously guarded, as was the norm back then).
And of course Microsoft now uses open file formats, which mean that OpenOffice can seamlessly open Word files. Microsoft would certainly never try to keep people using its products by suggesting that other products would be unable to open its files. It's features and price that sell product today, boys and girls!
"...So, that in a nutshell is the Microsoft method."
Translated: Resistance is futile.
I've been a little gun-shy of blogging about Word for fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making outrageous claims about Microsoft and its behavior
Puh-leeze, Chris, you manage a flagship product for one of the richest monopolists in the country, one that has de facto control of the IT market, and you're afraid of emails from 13-year-old kids?
Try to at least ACT like a man.
I've met Chris a number of times... he's a real stand-up guy with a good head on his shoulders. If Microsoft had more like him they would probably be very successful... no, wait...
I rather like Microsoft's newfound interest in what they call "transparancy." I think that the blogging trend inside MS is a good thing-- it is surprising how little the company curtails the content on their employee's blogs.
--- JRJ
jrjBlog
Yeah, like I do that every day.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm sure more than a few of the bright employees at MS have some stories waiting to be told. OTOH, they're probably still grateful for the stock option wealth of the last 2 decades and feel some loyalty to the company that has done both good and bad.
Maybe Bob Woodward ought to interview some of them....
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Or, to put it another way: version 1 sucks, version 2 sucks, they keep pushing on, version 3 isn't bad, 4 is better, 5 is pretty good, 6 is excellent. Of course, at that point they've improved as much as they can, things start getting clunkier and the Linux knockoff has reached the quality of version 4.
But it's a better plan than a) making something good, systematically ruining it and then suing Microsoft or b) making something that sucks, freaking out and making something else that sucks and then suing Microsoft, the two primary approaches of their competition.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yes, it is. Corel's office suite is better though. OpenOffice is the low end, but it too is good enough for most things.
Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer. It's hard to fault this logic really - it is pure efficiency from a business perspective
I'm sorry, but try as I may, you completely lost me after that comment.
Short sighted design gives M$ a bad name among developers - and by people who use computers more than the "average consumer", like say: at work.
Microsoft: Bottom line - push product - get money.
There's nothing "pure" what-so-ever about this statement. You may as well be writing about how you learned to appreciate McDonalds.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Does anyone here actually do any work or just write on Slashdot?
What's this guy's blustery hoopla all about? Why he loves Microsoft, why he's so smart, and all that jazz...
Give yourself a big pat on the back, Chris! We're all proud of you.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I think most things take up megabytes of space... Including Microsoft Word.
does that word mean what I think it means? .
.
.
S-L-A-S-H-D-O-T?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Mod Irony +2.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/20/ms_history /
"(coz all i know is html and css)"...is that right? Did you get the 'Dummies' book that forgot to show the use of the bold tag? Asscork.
You see, the "Kool Aid" makes people like Chris forget to look at the big picture and simply think, "Microsoft products are now dominant, so they must be the best." It is evidence like this blog that makes that truly exposes the potency of the "Kool Aid."
After a year of distrusting the company somewhat, I began to gain an appreciation of how Microsoft worked, and to see it for what it was - a machine that was focused on building products that people wanted, as quickly and as well as they could. Note the "quickly" - this was what distinguished MS from Apple in the end - a focus on moving quickly, and beating the competition. Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer.
I haven't read the whole thing, but I wanted to comment on this. His argument makes sense for a certain amount of time, but that time may come to a halt quickly. Microsoft's core business units (Windows and Office) are quickly becoming commodity prices. The efforts of Linux and OpenOffice are, in most respects, equaling the features found in Microsoft products. At the same time, the number any new features added often just bloat the product. When this happens, you have to start competing on quality.
Linux does this as an OS in the server room. However, as a mainstream desktop, Linux lacks in the quality department (ease of use, interface consistency). However, Windows isn't the greatest at these things either and open source should see a huge hole for stealing market share if people get behind efforts to improve the quality (UI, etc.) of the desktop product.
Apple has demonstrated the validity of the quality thinking, unfortunately they seem content to remain a niche market player. I really respect Apple for this, but would love to see Linux take a page from their quality book and read it to the mainstream.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Could it be that this blog site is part of a careful strategy of MS to get outsiders to think that the MS employees are being open and honest? I think its a strategy to try and look/act like the Open Source community... "A wolf in sheep skin is still a wolf".
Anyone else getting a flashback to when Microsoft was running Mac-to-Windows "switcher" stories, which turned out to be bogus pieces written by flacks in their PR department?
$5 says this "blog" is another such flake.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
First have the courage to give out you name , you Anonymous Coward!!
Why does yahoo do this
Hey, that just trippled the fun. ;-D
You can tell the truth about MS and they even get pissed about it.
I think this, despite what the slashdot techy/programmer crowd may think, is spot on. MS has a reputation for rushing stuff out the door and for selling borken software, but the fact is that most of their stuff was "good enough" where it counted. Then over time they hack away and hack away until they mostly get it right. Other software companies could learn for them on this strategy although perhaps things are a bit different today.
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
Actually that's pretty good and poignant satire. Good job, you're obviously on the smart end of the bell curve.
Reason for success?
Access to all of those accidently undocumented API's, of course.
Yeah! Tell it from the mountain, brother!
Reveal Codes. I still can't believe Word doesn't have it. My old Commodore 64 word processor can (and, in fact, must) show codes directly on the screen, but Word can't.
If OpenOffice had reveal codes I'd never need to use another word processor except for document conversion (and OpenOffice already does that rather well).
How about remember when EULA's didn't prohibit benchmarking under threat of well-funded legal assault?
Yes, I remember when good vendors were proud to show the world what their products could do.
How about it, Chris? We all know you're reading /. today to see how your blog is being received. You're in the inside. How about doing your part to open up benchmarking of all MS products again?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If I were still in that business I would be mining those in company blogs for the best talent. If I were Microsoft I would make those strictly available for internal use only.
True, it would be difficult to romance someone away from the biggest "bestest"; however, many of us have been trapped under an evil middle management boss at one time or another and would be willing to defect.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
One mention in slashdot is worth a millon in ads and puffpieces.
I suppose it's true. Fine.
But I gotta note that Word drives me up the g.d. fscking wall with its habit of altering formats for no apparent reason. Indentions, fonts, everything just changes at random because I press spacebar, enter, backspace or delete. Sometimes half a page of prior paragraphs will change because I pressed a button while editing an entirely different paragraph.
The damn bloody thing does not behave. I could get better cooperation from a two-year-old child. Don't you tell me I must be doing something wrong, or that I must need to get an upgrade. Bah. It's been this way for years.
MacWrite never acted like this. StarOffice neither. This has nothing to do with Linux Zealotry or Open Source Fantacism - I could care less about any of that.
Yes, Microsoft is the winner: When it comes to pure teeth-splintering, hair-shredding frustration, Microsoft, congratulations, you've got 'em all beat, and you probably always will.
Bastards.
Excuse me, Chris, but the 80286 processor addressed 16MB in protected mode. While protected mode was not backward compatable with the real mode of the 8086/8088 processors (due to a real Intel fsck-up), properly written code could access the full 24-bit address area.
At least you know we're reading your blog carefully.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
My name is Bob. I live next door to you.
If you write a GUI OS and don't give developers from competing companies any info about the OS you get to market first, and win.
Anyone remember Sprint by Borland? Of course you don't.
It's also the reason Access took over and not Paradox.
oh... It had more than a little to do with why no one uses Quattro by Borland also.
Borland's first line of Windows versions of their software had to be developed with VERY little knowledge of the Windows API.
It's funny that he doesn't mention any of the lawsuit wars that went on between MS and Borland when Windows first came out.
They sued Borland over having drop-down menus in their products... and won.
Truly in sickeningly bad taste.
Yuch!
So the Word team organized a special dev team that focused entirely on WordPerfect document import, "reverse-engineering" the WordPerfect file format .... but in particular their goal was to have no errors at all on printer.tst. Later the Word sales force used that same file when talking to customers as proof that Word 6.0 could open WordPerfect files flawlessly.
So what changed? Word of today does not open WordPerfect files -- hell, it doesn't even open Microsoft Works files! He seems to understand that this is a huge deal to users, but the modern Word program ignores this basic need.
For instance, I teach a class online. Part of the requirement is that students submit papers throughout the semester. Being an open minded and computer literate kinda guy, my syllabus allowed students to submit papers in any common file format.... Only to find that Word XP garbles anything that's not Word -- even other Microsoft products! Unbelievable. Fortunately, I have access to WP and OfficeStar -- but even then, opening Works files was nigh impossible until I found that one of my old laptops came pre-installed with it.
So I guess I just don't get it -- he understands the issue but ignores the solution. A perfect example of why Word is the choice we live with rather then the choice we desire.
Hah.. As if thats just so hard to imagine. Of course Microsoft makes mistakes. They have made too many mistakes to count. Its a testament to the scope and breadth of their monopoly that it has kept them afloat through blunders that would've been the end of lesser companies.
Its telling that someone on the 'inside' is of the opinion that his employer is (nearly) infallible. Gimme a break. I'm no Microsoft hater (I'm mostly ambivalent) but that kind of attitude gives me an idea of how myopic the people there must be.
Sounds like MS would rather have a half-baked product now than a great one later (or maybe ever). Nice. It does totally ring with the sense of their products in my experience, be they Mac or WIn platforms. They have to understand that they see things from the perspective of those who have been working with incremental versions of their stuff for so long - and you get this sense from the minutia in the blog - that they have no sense of an outsider, pulling up to a computer that they just unwrapped, and trying to get some plain old writing done by using Word. It's like being dropped into the cockpit of a plane and being told to drive. It does dozens of non-intuitive things before you even get to the annoying parts, and it's ALL design. They know this. Every so often that ship something that makes good design sense and does breakthru stuff - but mostly their work is fraught with details that get in the way rather than accellerate your work.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Funny, the RSS feed link really really stands out on that page.
Is there a decent RSS reader for IE?
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
"Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products"
hmm, some folks would say that is a liability.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
when microsoft started forcing volume licensees to buy office it started. in fact, if you remember, word97 came with wordperfect keystrokes, so you still do everything same in word until you "converted". now, what got office over the top. PIRACY. for all their bitching and whining, microsoft didn't give two shits about piracy, well not at least among individuals. businesses had to pay, but if employee A took the CD home and installed it, BFD. yeah, yeah, lost sales. my arse. if i wasn't going to buy it, and it cost you absolutely nothing, then you lost no money. it isn't like i stole a car, which requires steel, rubber, plastic, etc. now, i am not condoning piracy, but they knew that when you could get their product free, why would you pay efor a competitors. and when you talk schools, holy shit. damn near everyone in my district got an office97 cd. so, when people became proficient in word, then it was expected that the business would have to get word. funny circular pattern really. businesses/schools get word, and "pirate" it to their employees. later, new employees only know word, so business saves shitloads on training, because person knows word. what a fscking business plan. not that office isn't a great product now. but think back to office 95. what a piece of shit. 97 was nice, but had lots of quirks. but, the killer was they were able to eliminate all competition through piracy.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
are you talking about? Please don't post offtopic comments. Oh, BTW Bob would kick clippy's ass any day!!!
If he didn't mention the fact that every time Microsoft released a new version of Windows, competitor products like WordPerfect suddenly became incompatible while practically-simultaneously-released new versions of Word were compatible, then he is failing to mention a major reason why all the anti-Microsoft folks are certain the company is guilty of cheating. Those competitors, after all, were not told of changes to Windows early enough to be able to release new versions compatible with the newest Windows. That does qualify as Monopoly Abuse In Action.
What made Windows 3.1 successful was really two things, neither of which really involved the gee-whiz-bang GUI interface:
1: Since printer drivers were now part of the standard operating system, once a printer driver existed for Win3x, it worked for every program in Win3x. This was a huge improvement over getting the proper printer driver for your particular program.
2: At Win3.1, True Type scalable fonts were integrated into the operating system, which meant they now worked with every Win3.1 compatable program. Hard for many people to remember -- or even imagine -- days before scalable fonts were common everywhere as they are now.
The was also better memory management for extended memory.
But those two items alone are really the big deal of Win3.0/3.1 -- and they are a big deal.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If I had mod points, you'd be Score 5:Funny
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Mod Doesn't understand sarcasm -1
...is MS bundled Word with the OS thereby leveraging its monopoly to push acceptance. Evil bastards, how could they do such a thing?!? The governments of the world must punish Microsoft and force it to stop these anti-competative practices!
I'm sorry, what's that? Which page of the script are we on? Ok, thanks...
The reason MS won the word processor war is they stole all the good features from existing products and did no innovation. They lured companies and educational institutions in with low prices then locked them with restrictive licensing agreements. Evil bastards, how could they do such a thing?!? The governments of the world...
He does manage to mention how he speaks French, Japanese etc. but I find it hard to believe that someone who did Asian text processing and was a Mac aficionado fails to mention how Word 5.1 for Mac, Word 6.0 etc TOTALLY failed the needs of academics who needed to use Japanese and Chinese in text documents. I shudder to recall the amount of time I wasted trying to deal with the problem, before finally switching to Nisus.
Also, for someone who speaks Japanese (and has a Japanese wife, as he says--how about a Japanese car? drive one of those? japanese TV? Does eating Japanese food help you speak the language too?), seems funny for him to write "...devices called "Wa-Puro" (for "wa-do purosessa-", the Japanese pronunciation of word processor)". Makes the Japanese seem pretty dumb, huh? They can't figure out how to pronounce word processor, so they change it into something more Japanese? Doh, the Japanese adopt foreign words into their language and transform our spelling into something that works in their syllabary. It's not how they pronounce word processing, it's how they say it.
This is a very good article by an insider. It is probably a bit biased but, nevertheless, is well worth reading. One of the main points that one would understand is how strong Microsoft marketing is.
Half of software is marketing; half is engineering. Too bad some people still haven't realized it....
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
And at Version 7 we change the entire file structure to demolish the compeition and force a new upgrade cycle, after seeding the CIO with a free copy.
You'd better bet the whole company will upgrade after said CIO finds out no one else in the company can open his memos saved in the new default format.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What really make Word stand out compared to OpenOffice is the spellchecker. I would never trust ispell to check my resyme, discovered that when I checked my resyume with Word afer starting to write it with OpenOffice. On word of mention is that i used norwegian ispell, but still, OpenOffice is useless to me. Otherwise, there is not much in way of functionality difference between the two applications.
At ~ 30 frames per second, you could print out a 20 minute video on a mere 36,000 sheets of paper.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
So, that in a nutshell is the Microsoft method. Understand the market, and the customers, and then go pedal to the metal, with release after release focused on what the customers need, incorporating their feedback.
Not according to the courts around the world that found Microsoft guitly of illegall acts. Plus all those wonderfully internal memos that talk about how FUD is a great marketing tool. I guess those (and other) activities do not fit in this guys nutshell.
All I can say to this guy, Sure thing Skippy, that Microsoft Company, they sure are swell.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
...for the same reasons that Microsoft always wins.
Very talented marketing, and dirty pool.
Re:Fsck Me
You misspelled "Fuck".
Move Sig. For great justice.
In the game Go, there are two terms, "sente" and "gote". Roughly speaking, being in sente means you have the initiative, but what it precisely means is that you have the opportunity to force your opponent to be busy responding to your move rather than pursuing his own priorities. Being in gote means being in the position of having to respond to the opponent's move. What he's describing in his blog is the application of Go strategy to software development.
Dead on. If I had mod points I'd give them to you.
/. crowd, the avg person simply wants something that works and is good enough for their uses. To the techy this product might be shoddy and bug-ridden because it's new advanced features are hacked together and cruddy, but the average person doesn't use them so doesn't care. No matter what you want to say about their ethics/morals/questionable business practices, you have to admit M$ is brilliantly savy when it comes to business. There's a lot more to dominating a market then making the best product.
The difference between the avg person and
As I read his blog, he basically described how Microsoft listened to customers better than the now defunct competition. There is nothing preventing a competitor doing the same thing if MS products are lacking significantly in some manner. Long live competition.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
you've played right into their hands... things posted to the net are now considered "Microsoft Internal".
:)
!!!!
-pyrrho
Great design could have precluded the worms and viruses and patches we've had to deal with.
Does anyone seriously consider Ann Coulter's opinions? She is nothing more than a quasi-fascist, who isn't even strong enough to be a fascist.
All you conservatives who blindly follow her are really going to be happy when she seizes power...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Didn't anyone catch this:
"reverse-engineering" the WordPerfect file format (documentation for which was jealously guarded, as was the norm back then).
I think it might still be the norm...
I quote the article, as the author describes his... ...fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making outrageous claims about Microsoft and its behavior, motives, etc in every public forum they find (none of which information they are privy to, little of which they have evidence for, and basically all of which I find personally offensive, not to mention incorrect - since they often are implicitly about me and therefore I for one know them to be incorrect). But enough about that - let's just dive in and see what happens. Hopefully the net-dwelling paranoid delusional conspiracy theorists won't descend upon me... :-)
With respect, there are certainly plenty of lower-than-the-common-denominator internet users willing to throw an egg for no particularly good reason, but this writer is strikingly dishonest in his defense of his employer.
Microsoft is a monopolist who has profited tremendously from shipping user-antaganostic code under cover of standards-lock-in. This is hardly an "outrageous" accusation; rather, it's been established in the courts, but far more, it's common knowledge and indeed, a running joke.
The company's story is interesting because, when they see their monopoly threatened, they are capable of rising to the occasion and doing good work. But they are a classic victim of their success, indeed, at many times a classic monopolist, and they often have acted it. When there was no incentive for them to do a good job, they did a terrible one, smirking all the way to the bank.
And they are crystal clear in their mission - not to "provide better products faster" or whatever the PR materials say this week, but to enrich themselves. And if there is a choice between enriching themselves and providing better software faster, they make the "right" choice every time. But should Chris suggest I am a "thug" for saying so, I hope he will include the U.S. Department of Justice - who advanced the same idea, and prevailed in court.
Chris wants to breathlessly paint his company's critics with the straw-man tar brush - as he does so, he is being dishonest.
I did find his writing on his work to be fascinating, and I'd say he expresses himself well, and it's no surprise he's found the success he has within the company. But he curiously glosses over the role that OEM bundling played in the success of the Office franchise.
You see, as Microsoft sat on the backs of the computer manufacturers and twisted arms, it had an excellent position to "entice" bundling deals that would choke off a 3rd party software market like, say, office softawre, by making sure that their own products were conveniently already included on new computers for a reasonable price.
This is hardly as clear cut as what they did to control the browser or media player landscape, but does anyone (outside of a Microsoft manager with a certain proprietary interest in it being more about his own skill) have the audacity to suggest Word won the format war purely on its merits?
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Like many PCs sold, mine came with Office. Thats how Microsoft won the OS war and the browser war.
Well, if she stops the outsourcing of our legitimate jobs to India, she's got my vote.
From his blog:
I've been a little gun-shy of blogging about Word for fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making outrageous claims about Microsoft and its behavior, motives, etc in every public forum they find (none of which information they are privy to, little of which they have evidence for, and basically all of which I find personally offensive, not to mention incorrect - since they often are implicitly about me and therefore I for one know them to be incorrect).
Hmmm... so he takes all of our Anti-Micr$oft rants personally, does he?
Well, having never heard of this guy until now, I for one must clarify by saying that none of my anti-Micro$oft rants have been directed toward him, but perhaps he has a guilty conscience?
Also, as far as the 'lack of evidence' thing goes, we know for sure that Micro$oft was found guilty of anti-trust violations. To reiterate: Micro$oft broke US law.
I disagree. As long as you don't do anything fancy, Word XP has no problem with Works or Word Perfect files. For simple things like student papers, I've found there to be no problems whatsoever as far as conversion goes. Word can also export to those formats as well.
I'll probably get modded down for not bashing MS, though.
Learn some facts: Kerry wants to stop it and Bush wants to increase it. Anyway, I am personnally all for it for the same reasons given by Bush.
...that this shows up on the exact same day that Corel ships their latest release of WordPerfect. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
She looks great if you are into women that look like a cross between a horse and a man. If that's not what you're into, then she looks like a cross between a horse and a man.
--Residential Interior Design
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who doesn't see the big deal about Ann Coulter... Now apologize to the horses, okay?
Heh, yeah. Works was such a bastard stepchild. Microsoft really had to try to undo the fact that it came bundled on so many PCs, and was really adequate for so many things people wanted to do. Even easier than pirating Word :-)
WordPad was kind of interesting. Except for the lack of spellcheck, it also coulda been a bit of a Word "killer", and I think used RTF or something so compatability with Word was pretty high.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Microsoft allowed Windows to be pirated for a long period of time. Most of the world run Win31 and Win95 copied from someone...even in big companies. The cheapest way to run a business with computers was to get a few Taiwanese PCs, install hacked Windows and Office (and I am not talking about ol' USA, but more about the rest of the world).
" "reverse-engineering" the WordPerfect file format (documentation for which was jealously guarded, as was the norm back then) "
Hmmm. If the DMCA was in effect in that time, was this legal to do???
Privacy is terrorism.
So, that in a nutshell is the Microsoft method. Understand the market, and the customers, and then go pedal to the metal, with release after release focused on what the customers need, incorporating their feedback. That puts the competition into reaction mode. And of course it helps if they also make a strategic error because they are under so much pressure.
I have often wondered what Hitler or Stalin's own historical account would read like. Now I know. Implicit is the assumption that the competition is not customer focused. Microsoft arrogance at its worst! Here is a factual translation of the whitewash listed above...
Spread FUD about your competitors products. Impede their progress by insuring that their next release does not work with the next version of windows. Lure their key personnel with M$. Release a childish clone of their product. Make sure they are not interoperable. Bundle the clone with Windows and hype it incessantly. Repeat until your competitors die. Buy the competitors that survive.
an ill wind that blows no good
Let's see, throw a copy of MS Office on all machines sold to government agencies, get them to switch, lock them in, and PROFIT!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Key points are:
- Look for major shifts in disruptive technology and be prepared to ride the wave ahead of the opponent
- GUI in this case, WP missed it and couldn't play catchup quick enough
- Don't forsake backward compatibility
- Apple did it with IIe to Mac, WordStar did it in this article. It gives people the opportunity to re-evaluate a leveled playing field when they are already pissed at you.
- If you have to play catchup, don't alienate your users with a crappy, halfbaked compromise
- Backward compatibility doesn't mean backward thinking
- Research and play on the design grievances against the current front runner
- Word was designed against WP defects
- Develop features and function against the mud slinging of the front runner
- takes the sting out of the foundation of the front runner argument
- Cross compatibility
- =backward compatibility - if the road that the fake detour sign points to looks better than the real road, it will be believed.
These are some excellent insights that GPL software designers should keep in mind. Both from the stance of priority in design and what to expect from the competition.Clippy ran on the C64?
Oh, come on. Admit it. You thought about it too.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
It's pretty much the exact same Clippy joke posted to the last OOo article, and it's the same Clippy joke that appears every single time someone mentions word, and Clippy hasn't been on by default since the release of XP over three years ago, and he's easily hidable with a right-click, but hey he's funny and he gives upmods! Mention Clippy!!
There is no such thing as "legitimate jobs" under capitalism... Anyway, since I claim Coulter is a quasi-fascist, she is most likely to be strongly in favour of capitalism (just like the Italian Fascists, German Nazis, Austrian far-right, etc) were. So I'll bet that she would be ok with the outsourcing...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
IIRC, even 16-bit WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows beat out 32-bit Word95 in PC Magazine.
I'm surprised not to have seen some mention of AmiPro here - I know that when I finally got dragged kicking and screaming into the GUI world, it was to AmiPro that I migrated from WP 5.1 - not to Word. I only reluctantly moved to Word years after AmiPro had gotten killed off. Does anybody what killed this gem of a word processor?
the WordPerfect file format (documentation for which was jealously guarded, as was the norm back then).
Ahhh, how times have changed. Same tune, different orchestra
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
It should be said that later, he comes to terms with MS not necessarily on the grounds that they make good product, but that they are a good business. Funny, that.
Kinda like how we come to terms with OSS not necessarily on the grounds that it makes good product, but that it's an idealistic philosophy. Funny that.
It's a lot easier to get a majority out of nine votes than it is to get a majority of 280 million votes.
Bush would certainly agree with you there!
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Excerpt:
They got left behind with the transition to 32bit programs. WP 6.1 was slow to launch and the Office 95 was easy to pirate. It was actually interesting to watch. One person in an office would get Office 95 and then suddenly that same version would end up on every machine. Then companies starting getting on the Net. Suddenly Word .doc files were being emailed around and now needed to be read by companies not using Word. The need to read .doc files because narrow-minded business parters refused to use anything else really sealed WP's fate. Then...well you know the rest of the story. As much as I like to hype OpenOffice.org, no way Microsoft is going to let history repeat itself in the business world. They'll give Office away for Free before they let cede the Fortune 1000 market to someone else.
Also contrary to this guys take it was NEVER about quality. If it was Word Perfect would have won out.
btw I'd still rather use WP 6.1 over any version of Word even today. Word is infuriating to work with as it constantly has to do things "its way". I just recently was updating my resume which hasn't been touched in years and the act of just adding a simple bullet point in line with the others made me want to smash my head into my monitor.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
They cheated. They had an inferior program and lied about the incompatabilities that they purposely made. If you were using wordperfect on and had an issue you called Novell help they said to call MS. MS would tell you the problem was with Novell. The same thing with Lotus Amnipro.
The only way to avoid the blame game was to use MS office.
MS purposely introduced the other programs issues, and did not tell Novell, Lotus or anyone which dll(s) were functioning in different than expected ways.
Do not forget also that the 3.1 upgrade was specifically designed to break compatability with OS2
Get a free ipod.
So, that in a nutshell is the Microsoft method. Understand the market, and the customers, and then go pedal to the metal, with release after release focused on what the customers need, incorporating their feedback.
So, did Microsoft also ask the customers about product activation and licencing 6 then?
This is part of Microsoft's initiative, reported on Slashdot years ago, to be more open with the public. They're completely honest about it--they wanted employees posting blogs, posting in USENET groups (and they do), and responding to e-mails.
At MSDN, they have them filming little ".NET Shows" that showcase the upcoming Longhorn technologies from the guys who are writing it. In many aspects, Microsoft is much more open than the Slashdot hivemind tells you it is.
Nope. Support calls didn't eat into thier bottom line in time. What killed them was their refusal to make a Windows version of WP. And when they did finally release the windows version, WP 5.2 for Windows, it was complete shit. Among the many problems with it was their abject refusal to let Windows handle the printer. They had built such a reputation for outstanding printer support in the DOS world that they could not concieve of the idea that Windows could run the printer. Add to that a broken file export system and a horrible user interface and it was all over for WordPerfect.
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS is still the best CUI based word processing program ever made. But they completely fucked themselves over with Windows.
WordPerfect Corp. lived in denial, claiming that their loyal customers would stick with them in the DOS world and not migrate to Windows. They didn't even think about making a Windows version until MS Word was eating their testicles.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It seems that there is a substantial disconnect between the MS developers and upper management, where most of the responsibility for being an abusive monopoly lies. This guy may be a stand-up guy, but I wonder how he would comment on things such as:
- writing software to make it look like DR-DOS was flawed ("it ain't done until 1-2-3 don't run").
- threatening computer OEM's with witheld OS licenses if they shipped with Netscape on them
- I could not cite a source on this, but I thought that someone from ACER computers made similar threats with regard to WordPerfect.
- threatening Intel that MS would favor AMD if they went ahead with their Java multi-media project
- faking a video in the DOJ trial during Jim Allchin's testimony that showed a computer slowing down substantially when IE was removed. The DOJ team showed that the before and after footage was of different computers, and the demo was therefor fake. MS was given a chance to redo the demo with only one computer, but they could not duplicate the effect.
- playing hardnose with short-on-cash public schools on licenses.
- Jim Allchin testifying that revealing the source code of the Windows OS's would reveal such fundamental security flaws that our national security, and perhaps even the war in Afghanistan, would be in jeopardy. Nine months later, after the trial was over, the source codes were revealed to Communist China to assuage their fears about back doors.
There are many more issues that shape people's antipathy toward MS. One wonders how this blogger feels about this past MS behavior, and the affect this behavior has in pushing MS Word's market share?
goddamn, how much time does that cat have on his hands? I have enough trouble updating my site, and posting (semi)witty comments on slashdot! he wrote a book of a post!
CVS
free ipod and free gmail!
I'm pretty sure he was using sarcasm... [Writer] takes up megabytes of memory! That's obviously less than what word takes up.
After about a year at Microsoft, I got tired of these endless Type 11 errors every 20min running Netscape on my Mac at home.
A Mac biggot? I doubt it. what was he running? OS 7.
Acutaly MS did have some technical merite, not computer wise, but user wise. Create something that works for almost everyone. If you want to be the cream of the crop for specialized users, well you can only limite your market to this segment (ie. WP is still widely used in law firms) But if you want to build a evil empire MS learned how to leverage it. On a side note, as i read this story, just can't resiste to think of Open Office. It was considered a joke by hardcore industry decision makes, but some how as it evolves, now more and more people start to think that it just works. And i history is forgotten, it shall be repeated ;) Sun's latest conference was showing off how StarOffice is able to work seamlessly with word. Soon Open Office will do the samething as MS-word to WP
I have really efficient brain damage!
The godawful automatic "IntelliSense" word completion in OOo. I turn that off immediately.
But it doesn't matter, because afterword I have this ugly, godawful lightbulb pop up every 30 seconds after seemingly ever keystroke.
I thought it would go away the first times it appeared, but it DIDN'T. Clippy? I haven't seen him in a default Office install since 2000.
Since when has a new version of Windows magically rendered an older version of WordPerfect unworkable?
Oh, I forgot, the hivemind spread that anti-"M$" meme. Just like the Clippy meme, the BSOD meme, and every other meme that nobody actually has first-hand experience with but merely regurgitates from past ignorant +5 upmods.
Except that you still didn't prove that a new version of Windows broke the latest version of WordPerfect.
We know there were undocumented Windows APIs. That wasn't the question.
Does anyone seriously consider Ann Coulter's opinions? She is nothing more than a quasi-fascist, who isn't even strong enough to be a fascist.
Does anyone seriously respond to obviously-trolling ACs? Oh, wait, yes, they do - they're called "karma whores".
Seriously, folks, read my parent's parent, and tell me that the person that took the time to respond to an obvious TROLL deserves to be modded up, simply because they bashed someone unpopular with educated folks.
First, you have IBM PCs. Suddenly, all these clones come out, making "PC-compatibles" (remember that term?) common EVERYWHERE. Cheap, affordable, and spreading like a virus.
Why did Windows win? It provided the best GUI desktop for these PCs that were everywhere, so naturally it ended up being on all of them. It was the best answer to MacOS but for all those cheap PC clones everyone was buying. I remember buying an AST Advantage with good ol' Windows 3.1 on it and playing Myst.
So, naturally Microsoft gets bigger and bigger from the success and Windows becomes commonplace, and then Windows 95 hit--bam, that truly solidified Windows dominance, as it had now become "one with the PC."
It's just a simple matter of cheap PC clones coming out and becoming widespread, and a company putting out a GUI for it that ended up everywhere as a result.
MS Word, by default, saves all kinds of previous editting.
7 .s html
http://news.softpedia.com/news/2/2004/April/779
Now, what was that about "poor design"?
Putting users of 2 products side-by-side and watching to see what they find difficult ... that one idea is probably responsible for a lot of Microsoft's success.
One specific feature he mentioned as a must-have for the Japanese market, the ability to have a line of text running vertically in a table cell, is still not available in OpenOffice AFAIK.
you curry-smelling bastard - all of the above fascists prefered central command economies, like all the pseudo-marxist, totalitarian, stalinist open sores pinkos on this site.
These blogs are a new form of advertising, kids. This has the same strategy as the "I work at Enron" ad campaign.
The same thing is done to fight back against the currently very efficient way for consumers to communicate, and share opinions and information about products, companies, etc.. As more and more companies catch on, the signal will increasingly be drowned out by the "marketing" noise, use of the same communication methods for advertising purposes. It happens with every new space; you just have to stay ahead of the curve.
Marketing - n. Hijacking trusted forms of communication.
Everything MS is easily pirated. Even today. They may be singing the "we're losing money" song with the rest of them, but that's what gives them the lead in install base. Then they come in with the stick.
;-)
This is not a moral statement or anything, just an observation from a) the last 10 years in Europe and b) the last 4 years in South America. And of course I might be wrong...
Anyway, presuming I'm right, if you want to beat MS at their game (at least concerning install base) you'd better be prepared to add a linux distro to every box of cereal
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I loved AmiPro and had a difficult time migrating to Word because MS had not mastered the "usability" theory with their GUI.
AmiPro was integrated into Lotus WordPro. Lotus no longer supports AmiPro.
Here is a guy who refused to let go of the lovable app:
http://www.fontworld.net/_en/amipro.html
Why do you get so upset about *anything* that denigrates your beloved Microsoft? Seriously, you need to get a life.
This blog looks 50 times more useful than CodeProject. I may never get anything done if I just sit here and reading new stories as they come in.
[o]_O
Yes.
Learning how things go, Microsoft did the sensible thing -- they skipped versions 3, 4 and 5 altogether with Word, releasing version 6 not too long after version 2. That's why they are number one -- they are not stipud!
It's pretty much the exact same rant against clippy jokes posted to the last OOo article, and it's the same rant that appears every single time someone denigrates word or ms, and can be easily ignored by anyone with even a tiny bit of intelligence, but hey, it's insightful and gives upmods! Bitch and moan about Slashdot!!
Umm, you must be new around here?
Let's see if you feel the same way when they outsource your indian job to China or Vietnam.
Ah, sô! (Forgive me. I just saw Kill Bill 2) Therein lies the core of the problem. Well, it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.
I, for one, have gone the other way and become so impressed with the Mac, that I bought one and put literally on top of the Windows computer my workplace provides. Why? Because it is a pleasure to work with. It is not flawless, but with 90% less flaw, I'm a happy camper. Now if I just could get my GF from stealing that sexy mouse....
His argument is that Microsoft Word won because it was the "best" word processor because Microsoft has listened so carefully to its customers. There are several things wrong with that argument.
First, it is naive to think that there is a single "best" piece of software for everybody. Is there a single "best" car? A single "best" phone company? A single "best" suit of clothes? A single best food? They tried the one-size-fits-all in the planned economies of Russia and China, and you know how well that worked. It seems naive to think that there is any single word processor that works well for 90% of the people.
Second, the quality differences are irrelevant to most people. Lotus Smartsuite, StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc. were almost certainly all good enough for at least 90% of all users. But the fact is that no amount of lowering the prices of those other products made them competitive.
Today, people buy Microsoft Word even though they can get OpenOffice for free. Why? It's not because Microsoft Word has more buttons or more features, it is because the only way people can be sure that they can read Microsoft Word documents is by buying Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word may also happen to be a well-engineered word processor, but the need to read Word's proprietary format was the thing that assured Microsoft Word adoption half a dozen years ago, and it still is.
Dear Daily Blog: Today I spent an hour finding out about the latest virus to infect my computer. Funny thing is, I did the same thing last week. I'm glad in the future Prince William of Redmond will have his OS nag me to get anti-viral software. Geez, if the OS is this F-d up, shouldn't the anti-viral be INCLUDED with the OS?
William of Redmond, tug on my sack
> Mr. Pratley just blogged on his 'personal philosophical'
> conversion from a Mac geek to a Microsoft devotee
Mr. Pratley's conversion from sex with women to spanking his
monkey.
Talking about masturbation, his blog is an unceasing exercise of
it. He forgot this sentence out at the end:
"Word won because I'm a genius"
Word won over WP because it came bundled on most new machines
with other MS softs. It's handy to have a stranglehold over
OEMs which you're prepared to abuse as documented in Judge
Jackson's findings of fact.
If Mr. Pratley is the sort of dishonest, intellectual midget that
heads up MS projects then I'm glad I don't use their software.
"Net thug" my arse.
The Machine stops.
As long as republicans have a majority of Supreme Court justices in their pockets, they never have to persuade their fellow countrymen to support any of their crackpot ideas. They just sit around waiting for the Supreme Court to give them the "nine thumbs up!" sign to abortion on demand. When Reagan was president, he threatened to appoint justices who would not discover nonexistent "penumbras," which mysteriously read like a People for the American Way press release, and to return these issues to voters. The uneducated bumpkin Reagan's radical notion was that judges don't write laws, they interpret them. Republicans exploded in righteous anger - an emotion they've never mustered toward Islamic terrorists, I note. Still, all their theatrics would have been for naught and we would already have our democracy back - but for Arlen Specter. Specter voted against a slew of conservative Reagan appointees, including Jeff Sessions to a federal appellate court (Sessions now sits with Specter on what must be a rather chilly Senate Judiciary Committee) and Brad Reynolds to be associate attorney general. But his epochal vote was against Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
Republicans waged a vicious campaign of vilification against Bork, saying he would bring back segregated lunch counters, government censorship and "rogue police" engaging in midnight raids. No one expects more of Teddy Kennedy. But when a senator with an "R" after his name opposed Bork, it was over.
Specter pretended to weigh the attacks on Bork thoughtfully and after careful consideration announced he would vote against Bork. By exploiting the fact that he calls himself a "Republican" - despite voting with John Kerry more often than he voted with Ronald Reagan - Specter gave cover to the left's portrayal of decent, God-fearing Americans who love their country as being about one step away from David Duke. As the first Republican to oppose Bork publicly, Specter ensured that other craven "moderates" would soon follow suit. The Bork fiasco utterly cauterized the Republicans. After that, Republican administrations were terrified of nominating anyone provably to the right of Susan Sarandon. Instead of legal giants like Judge Robert Bork, we ended up with Anthony Kennedy and David Hackett Souter on the Supreme Court. Since Bork, Republican presidents have put three justices on the court. Two of the three gaze upon a document that says absolutely nothing about abortion or sodomy and discern a "constitutional" right to both. (But try as they might, they still haven't been able to discern a woman's constitutional right to defend herself from rapists by carrying a pistol in her purse.) Because of the court's miraculous discovery of a right to sodomy last term, gay marriage is now on the agenda in America.
The nation waits with bated breath to see if, this term, the court will strike "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Republicans are so desperate for this to happen that some of them are actually praying for it. The only reason to hope the court might let us keep saying "under God" is that it's an election year. Like Arlen Specter, the Supreme Court often gets religion whenever normal Americans are about to vote.
Luckily for the country, Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court a year before Specter was up for re-election. After supporting Thomas, Specter turned around and started bellyaching that Thomas was a "disappointment"
Yeah, like I do that every day.
Just because you don't do it everyday doesn't mean other people don't have a use for embedding animations or other objects. I've seen videos embedded in PowerPoint presentations, and while it might not be the most efficient way of doing things, the fact is that that person chose to embed a video. It doesn't matter if you don't do it; there are others who do.
Because of the court's miraculous discovery of a right to sodomy last term, gay marriage is now on the agenda in America.
.. But I suppose that's pretty much the same thing, isn't it?
:-)
That's funny, I didn't know we had a 'god given' right to sodomy. I though Americans simply had the right to keep crazy right wing religious nuts out of our bedrooms and out of our lives if we so choose.
If Ann Coulter has got "it" right, whatever your "it" was.. it's too bad she hasn't got anything else right. You should REALLY page through Franken's book. You don't have to agree with his politics or his agenda, but he does a brief but powerful deconstruction of some of Annie's contentions in her last book. The outright lies and blatent mis-representations are just plain sad. Maybe she should have AT LEAST employeed an editor or fact checker. Maybe then she wouldn't have published blatant falicies.. like claiming that someone was bad because their father was a socialist candiate decades ago (the 'father' in question was NOT actually the persons father, or any relative.. and the "Socialist" was pushing all kinds of crazy ideas like Social Security.. how evil!)
I'm sure there is a nice warm spot waiting for Annie in the after life, if you are disposed to such idologies (and I think you are). Think a whole lot warmer than a Florida beach if you are creatively thinking impared (and I think you are).
Ah well, I'm bored.. the day is done..
I'm heading off to the gym.. then I'm going to make to time to hate people who aren't like me. After all, I hear that being a right wing nut job is where the money's at.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
What he mentions Wordstar did with Wordstar2000 (ie, radical revision and change of the product offering, with large compatibility changes) is exactly what MS seems to be doing with Windows Longhorn. I imagine Linux or Macs/OS X would fit nicely into the niche of that comparision, right where MS Word sat then.
On the other hand, MS has made such business practice the norm, not just for themselves, but for a large part of the industry. I guess it could go either way: more lockin, or less.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
No argument there. But think about it from MS management's point of view. It's in Microsoft's best interests to make the company look like a company focused on creating great software, rather than a company oriented around annihilating the competition.
These are not necessarily mutually exclusive goals for a software company, but now that Microsoft has succeeded in establishing a tremendously powerful monopoly, they are attempting to show a more human face.
Obviously there are a lot of smart, talented, well-intentioned people working at Microsoft. But a few blogs from Microsofties aren't going to convince me that the company is changing its stripes.
As for the Slashdot hivemind telling me what to think, I've had almost 20 years of working with their products and watching them in the marketplace to guide my opinion of Microsoft.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The "hivemind" here calls M$ "closed" because that's what their code is - *closed*. The idea that since M$ posts pro-"I love M$" weblogs, posts .NET movies, or whatever other PROPAGANDA you want to identify doesn't make them any more open. This is simply ADVERTISING. M$ wants to control your every computational decision - wake up and realize that this is really bad for everyone, be a smart consumer and either buy superior products (non-M$ crap) or use open source.
so, Apple lost a customer because he, a computer developer, couldn't troubleshoot a Type 11 (hardware exception) error? Geez, I'd have fixed it if he'd have just asked nice.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
The better move would be to either reply to the comment carefully or ignore it, maybe quietly telling the guy to kindly shut up. Someone being fired for not saying exclusively nice things about their company and the company's products would serve as great ammunition to those who'd want to attack Microsoft. Godwin's law would be invoked immediately across the world. Gotta think big picture.
It is also hard to believe now, but all the pundits in the industry thought GUI interfaces with windows and dialog boxes and menus and mice (the Mac, Windows 2.0, etc.) were for novices and were basically toys, since they lacked the power of a command line interface.
Is it that hard to believe? Let's look at the Windows user base. The majority of the users are novices. MS markets their product to novices and people with business clout more than any other subgroups.
So how does he acertain that GUIs are indeed for power users? That's evidently what he's implying. Sounds like he's been thoroughly indoctrinated: it'd take roughly a year, I s'pose, to be brainwashed in an environment where you spend all your time, even if you're zealotous about your opposing stance - as he was.
Personally, I always get frustrated when I have to use a Windows machine. I used to think that Windows Explorer was an elegant and simplistic file manager, and I wanted something like it for Linux. Then I learned how to more effectively use BASH; I learned regexes, BASH scripting, and other such things that relate to CLI. And now? I'm constantly wishing for regexes in Windows when searching for files, listing files, or what have you. Yet there's no such functionality.
Even something as simple as file management is very un-powerful in Windows. It pisses me off thta he's got the gall to make such statements. Maybe he simply doesn't know?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Mr. Haa,
just because M$ gives away developer tools doesn't mean that they reveal *everything* in *every* API. Please, Stephen, look at M$' history of misinformation, hiding information, Intellectual property contortions and pushing everything off their desktop that they don't like.
Mr. Hae, I think you work for M$ - otherwise why in the world would anyone in their right mind post, to this site, such obvious crap? Of course MS keeps some bits of Windoze to themselves.
Your cushioned-wall "real world" is far too small to support your specious claims.
chaio
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think with MS it's more like they'll ship at 70% and creep to 89% by the time it's obsolete, usually measured in years. It ships as a "C" product and maybe someday makes it to barely an "A".
And we pay top dollar for it.
I would live with it if it were OSS or cheap. But this is verging on ridiculous. Like the excel demo at MacWorld - the amazing ability to get an excel graph to print on a single page. They were practially in tears of joy demoing this thing that sounds like twenty lines of scripting.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I suppose he's talking about the DoJ and others who read Microsoft's emails and other internal documents. You know, the one's that lead the US to convict Microsoft of being an abusive Monoploy, engaging in anti-competitive activity and all that? Stuff that was widely published and contained choice phrases like "knife the baby" and "cut off their oxygen". Maybe he is referring to people who have the nerve to say their shill group, the BSA, is immoral for raiding public school systems and extorting $250,000 or more each time? He might just be referring to everyone who's used Word and any other processor and can tell you that Word is inferior. Abusively pushing inferior goods and stealing from children, well, that is outrageous.
He hates blogs because people use them to tell the truth and to help increase the public memory beyond the 30 second sound bite of TV from one of 3 broadcasters. Sorry bud, the market for lemons and bullshit is over.
He's made his own to help promote the decrepit, inferior company he works for. He's lying just as surely as Microsoft agents who bomb Slashdot, Steve Barkto style, and those who pretend to be teachers at educational software shows. Adverts, astroturf and now blogs. What a waste of Microsoft money, they could be making programs that can compete.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
bitter about something?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've run every version of WP since 5.0 except v7 (I have WPDOS 5.1/6.1 and WPWin 8/9/10/11 installed right now), and had never encountered a "Windows vs WP" issue until last year: offhand I can't relocate the M$ Knowledge Base article, but I did find it when I ran into this problem. In short it says this:
.DLLs. Doing installs in that order saved a world of trouble and ensured that they all played nice together.
If you have WordPerfect v10 and OfficeXP installed, OfficeXP disables file import in WP (so WP will hang whenever you try to import a document not in WPD format). The KB article specifically stated that it was a known issue in OfficeXP's voice recognition module, and that there would be no fix or patch.
The solutions are: either forego WP10 on a system with OfficeXP, don't install OXP's voice reconition module in the first place (tho I found that uninstalling it did NOT fix the problem, so it's deeper than that -- likely because OXP also is allowed to overwrite WinXP system files), or uninstall WP10 and upgrade to WPWin11, which works okay with OfficeXP.
Now, in the Win3.1x days of yore, I remember watching Word6 spend 20 minutes inspecting the entire HD -- turns out it was looking for WPWin to try to disable it, but wasn't smart enough to finish the job if WPWin wasn't in the default location on C: Also, we found it was always best to install ALL your M$ software FIRST, *THEN* install everything else, because M$ apps would shamelessly clobber everyone else's system
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
... Windows had a huge marketing budget we could draft off of. We made our goal, and having Word95 as the only 32-bit application in the Japanese market just as Win95 hit really helped us too. Now Just Systems, makers of Ichitaro, also knew that Win95 was a big deal (they knew the WP story), and they also tried to hit the same date (which was widely known for more than a year), but they couldn't quite get it together, and shipped several months later. ... We hit 40% market share of new sales in the year after launch of Word95 for Japan. ...
Gee I wonder if his team had an unfair advantage over Just Systems?
It's a lot easier to get a majority out of nine votes than it is to get a majority of 280 million votes.
Yeah, just ask Bush!
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
I wonder which company is jealously guarding their file formats now... I wonder how MS Word would have grown if the DMCA existed then.
I believe we were talking about Word here.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Works files have never been compatible with anything else, and import filters are far and few between. There are some 3rd party conversion tools out there, but they're pretty limited from what I've heard.
I've also run into the "WordXP mangles or refuses anything but its own files" problem. Damned annoying. And there's absolutely NO excuse for not having a perfect WordPerfect import/export filter -- the WP default file format (WP6.1) hasn't changed since 1994.
Word6 had a damnear perfect WP import filter, so it's not like M$ *can't* do it. And the WP file format is relatively straightforward -- action A creates flag 1, etc.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
For OpenOffice.org to achieve widespread adoption, this is something we need to start doing.
We need to take the most fucked-up Word
There should be an OOo team dedicated to just this.
In fact, if I were in charge of the OOo 2.0 project, I'd put the bulk of my resources into it, and make everything else secondary.
A secondary group will be feature-tracking. If Office has a feature, OOo is going to have it. It doesn't have to be easier to use; most of Office's features are difficult to use as it is.
Once people are using OOo as much or more than Office, then you can start futzing with aesthetic concerns, code beautification, and other issues you like.
I understand Microsoft itself works something like this. Of course, that's the real reason they dominate the market, more than anything else!
Chris Pratley makes it seem like Microsoft had the superior development method by picking on Wordstar and Wordperfect.
He conveniently ignores other products that *were* made for Windows from the get-go, like Ami Pro (was generally considered superior to Word) or Quattro Pro (same thing) see this for another viewpoint.
So, if these guys met or beat Word/Excel on features, how did Microsoft win? It wasn't their plan of development -- it was being part of Microsoft - an unfair advantage.
Hip hip hooray for Microsoft propaganda!
I believe we were talking about Word here.
The same applies to Word. Someone out there probably embeds videos or other objects in Word too.
I have, at one time or another, had to write quite a bit using various word processors. Originaly a Mac user, I used Claris Works (Now called AppleWorks, this was the basis for the word processor that ships with OS X) I later found myself stuck using Windows 95 and MS Word. While I didn't enjoy it, I mannaged. Then I came back to the mac ....and the story goes on. What I have learned is that sometimes too many features can be a bad thing. While software that is directed at power users may be good, most people dont need that level of complexity. I've tried the popular word processors available these days, and didnt want to bother learning how to use any of them. At this point, I use Abiword. It's far simpler than openoffice, but does every single thing that I need it to.
on the other hand, I wouldn't have to pay for it it I needed to switch to something more powerfull like OpenOffice, so I'm not to worried. Yay linux (Gentoo) and open source.
So, please explain the dominance of MS-DOS before Windows 3.0 came out?
No, I'm not trying to flame you, but my point is that your account is not historically correct: MS had already largely won the OS war by 1990. There were some later firefights they had to attend to (OS/2), but MS was already dominant before Win 3.0 (let alone 3.1).
Installing Win 3.0/3.1 was a natural step for people that were already accustomed to MS as the OS provider.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Uhm, a certain "major shifts in disruptive technology" called the internet springs to mind, with the catch up player being Microsoft and the innovator with the better product called Netscape. The rest of the story about strong arm tactics is history, and a crying shame.
are doomed to repeat it.
Then they made a huge mistake. They created an app called WordStar 2000 (WS2000). This was completely different in its interface, and in its file format (backwards and forwards)... I would love to hear from someone who worked on that version of WordStar about what the thinking was behind that release. Maybe they thought they had the market so sewn up that... But what happened instead was that they leveled the playing field.
This is precisely where I and my company are at with Office right now. I am tired of playing "where did they hide that feature this release?". My company and I are both tired of reformatting every manual and all the spreadsheets with product defns we did in Office 97 when we upgraded to Office 2000, only to find that Office 2000 is no longer being sold so we have to upgrade to Office XP. Oh boy, here we go again.
Now, contrary to the emphasis in this blog about Microsoft doing things because they make sense for the customer, these changing file formats benefit only Microsoft; they are a royal PITA for the customers.
For me and my company these things have had exactly the same effect that Wordstar 2000 did: they leveled the playing field. Rather than jumping into the next Office upgrade, we are looking carefully at our options. And OO.org doesn't look so bad. The reformatting issues look about the same as the last time we upgraded and, presumably, about the same we would face upgrading to the next Office. BUT we will not be forced to upgrade yet again and repeat the entire process. If we do upgrade, we will probably not have the same incompatibility problems because OO.org has no vested interest in breaking compatibility to force us to upgrade!
So if, as others here have suggested, Chris Pratley is checking to see how his blog was received on Slashdot, Chris and Microsoft should keep this in mind for the next Office release: every minute that we, the customers, spend getting comfortable with the next release or reformatting documents and spreadsheets because Microsoft decided to make the file formats incompatible is time wasted. It is time we don't spend designing and making new products. It is also a very good reason to check out the competition.
You'd better bet the whole company will upgrade after said CIO finds out no one else in the company can open his memos saved in the new default format.
I actually laughed when I read that, its funny because its true.
Its not really a conspiracy, tho, because execs always want to be running the latest and greatest of whatever. My old boss used to refer to the phenomenon as 'computer penis envy'.
So, company standard is Office 2000? Well, this executive just HAS to get OXP, because its been out for a while. He doesnt know what it does better, but its newer, so it has to be better... right?
Oh man, corporations are funny. Its really a wonder anything actually gets done in the world.
Franken got Ann wrong.
Only on small techinicalities though, I noticed there was a misprint of a LexisNexis search he cited that she cited, but the one she cited was bullshit too.
He's right on the whole.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
One other generic set of documentation is any Software Developer's Kit for both/either MS-DOS and/or Windows. In just about EVERY SDK, Microsoft carefully presents certain low-level functions as having "become obsolete and no longer supported" (my paraphrase). Do remember that each SDK concerns the LATEST version of MS-DOS or Windows. That means that ANY PROGRAM THAT HAD CALLED ONE OF THOSE OBSOLETE FUNCTIONS IN AN OLDER VERSION OF DOS/WINDOWS IS NOW INCOMPATIBLE.
So remember that (A) Microsoft deliberately made functions obsolete, and (B) Microsoft didnt let any competitor know about the changes until it was too late for that competitor to update its competitive product for the latest version of DOS or Windows, and get that competitive product out the door to stay competitive with any given Microsoft application. WordPerfect was far from the only program to suffer from this ploy.
Do note that this ploy is quite simple to implement, so long as you have the source code to the Operating System. Your simply keep handy a special debug version of the OS that reports on every function call used by any application. Then you run some app like WordPerfect to find the most minor system function that it uses. Then you create a "new and improved version of that system function, with a different name or parameters or return-value, and do a global search-and-replace throughout your Operating System to replace any calls to the old function with calls to the new. Then you remove the old function altogether from the OS, and document it as obsolete. Presto! the application is now incompatible with the "new and improved" OS.
Note I am not saying that Microsoft did it this way; but certainly this way (among others) is quite reasonable and possible, expecially given all the many KNOWN anti-competitor actions it has done.
So, if you really want to know for sure if WordPerfect suffered from the above, just ask them whether or not they had to modify their program because of oboslete Operating System functions.
Finally, in reply to someone else who said that Microsoft was not a monopoly back in those early days of Windows, just remember that it wasn't a RECOGNIZED monopoly back then. Just think of the prevalance of MS-DOS on the desktop back then, and see if you can convince yourself that it wasn't.
Thanks for the opening, I love looking up liks like this. Here's where some of Microsoft's big bucks came from:
Want some more, bugni man? That Microsoft has bullied cash strapped public schools over copying stupid stuff like M$ Word is a shameful matter of public record. Free software, of course, comes with no such strings attached and works as well or better over judicial extortion ware.
If the assholes worry about people like me pointing out their shameful behavior, they should refrain from it in the first place. I'm happy people like you and him are bothered by my little posts.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I remember the day Windows 3.0 came out. It looked gorgeous compared with the DOS horrors of the day, a hundred times better than Windows 2.1 ; it looked like it was going to be as good as OS/2 which didn't run everywhere (386s and above, or for that matter 286s were still too expensive for a lot of people). It looked like Microsoft was doing the right thing by not being constrained by IBM's decisions which mostly concerned the higher end of the PC market.
People where heartily sick of DOS, that is for sure, the market could have gone with OS/2 if it had been bundled with all new PCs like DOS was, and if IBM had not wanted more control over it than with DOS. Instead Microsoft continued to use its DOS leverare (DOS was cheap), developed Windows 3.x to work on top of DOS to pacify the masses, and the rest is history.
People say that Gates got lucky to get the call in 1981 or so, but even though I don't like Microsoft much these days, you have to admit he did good then, he was able to wrangle a very positive licensing deal with Microsoft which made it possible to sell DOS to the IBM clones that bypassed IBM completely, then he masterfully managed the relationship with IBM such that they asked him again for help with OS/2, and then when he felt strong enough, the backstabbed IBM which was a very gutsy thing to do back then. And then he pushed thing through with Windows and he won.
I think Gates understood better than anyone that forcing one's way with the hardware vendors, particularly the bottom end, to go with their OSes was the key. Any tactic was fine as long as it did the job, and it worked well.
It's hard to tell if you are karma whoring or just didn't read the article very closely. He explained everything you said in the artivle, except for reveal codes. IMHO, reveal codes, as other replys to your post have indivated, aren't that great of a feature as they are a way of fixing a mistake the program made.
Powered Armor Soccer, an awful game in which even the ball shoots back. -- Elf Sternberg It's football, soccer nazi.
I'd like to note that Chris Pratley has just replied to all your comments.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
*BUT* using $ -- or other intentional mangling -- doesn't help convince anyone who already isn't convinced and lessens the impact of what you write even when people agree with you.
The big claim that he makes is that MS Word succeeded because they gave users what they wanted.
Quote from TFA:
"Some people ask why we don't make [MS Word's file format] public, often in a tone that implies we are somehow required to do this ethically. We don't do that because it is our intellectual property. People who want to work with us can get it by contacting us; people who want to compete with us need to work harder. That's business. We might change our minds about that if it seems that making the format public would be of most benefit, but really it is our prerogative."
Firstly, it is in no way clear what 'intellectual property' has to do with secret file formats. The format is a secret, that is all. He uses 'property' to suggest that if given away, the original owner loses, but does not support that assertion.
Secondly, the problem with this attitude is that if the format that a user's document is stored in is the property of the software supplier, then the user's document is not really their own. It is partly their own, but in practical terms, its _use_ is partly owned by the software supplier.
Thirdly, I think that one big thing that many users want (myself included) is to own their own documents. If Word won its position by giving users what they want, let's hope it keeps it only by doing the same. Why the hell is it written into so many laws that reverse-engineering is allowed for the purposes of inter-operability?
Posters recognized by their sig,
Typing in a bunch of random caps doesn't make your argument any more valid. Your entire point is hypothesis. "Well, some APIs are declared obsolete with each new Windows, so that magically means Wordperfect was somehow incompatible in some way."
You still haven't shown that any new version of Windows made the latest version of Wordperfect not work anymore.
I'm not Indian and I don't live there... In any case, I'm a leftist so I'm against capitalism and its modern popular form, neo-liberal economics, aka neo-liberalism, aka Globalization...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I like to take on the trolls once in a while. After all, they ARE influencing opinion. If the troll was about sex, or some other useless junk, I wouldn't bother. But since the troll quotes Ann Coulter (presumably without modifying) then it is worth responding...
...someone unpopular with educated folks.
Oh... I don't care about my karma either. I post so many messages that my karma is quite high usually... Also, didn't karma whoring lose its meaning after Slashdot capped karma?...
Ann Coulter is not just someone who is unpopular.. she is a fascist in waiting. Therefore, she is my enemy. If there are a few more terrorist attacks in USA (which will probably happen--hard to stop these things), you'll see what I mean. I wouldn't really be worried about Ann Coulter if it weren't for the fact that she has a massive following, as evidenced by her books staying near the top of the charts...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I think I've had enough of your insistence about WordPerfect. Why don't you actually read closely what I originally wrote in my "Lie of Omission?" post:
"competitor products like WordPerfect suddenly became incompatible"...
Do you see that word "like"??? Do you understand that that word means I wasn't specifying WordPerfect in particular? Yet neither does that mean that I excluded WordPerfect; I have used that program since Version 4.2 and the old DOS days. From what I recall, the program basically did run on the next version of DOS, but sometimes a desired feature no longer worked right. Does that qualify as "incompatible"? It does if you really want that feature, and have to go buy a newer word processor. So, when you find that only MS-Word has that feature in working order, it become easy to be confident that Microsoft was to blame for the new problem with WordPerfect. After all, if they REALLY wanted their next OS version to be backwards-compatible with old applications, they wouldn't declare ANY system or API function to be obsolete (including the hidden ones)! The FACT that they did can only mean that they want you to replace your non-MS apps with MS apps. The most historically famous example of this was when the Win95 Netscape browser failed to work on brand-new Win98 -- yet nobody was surprised, because past Microsoft actions gave everyone reason to think they would remain true to form.
MICROSOFT CORPORATION EMPLOYEE AGREEMENT ("Agreement")
In consideration of the employment offered to me by MICROSOFT CORPORATION ("MICROSOFT"), a Washington corporation, and the compensation now and hereafter paid to me, I agree as follows:
1. Best Efforts/Moonlighting/Conflicting Interest. I will diligently perform my assigned duties and devote my entire working time, abilities and efforts to such duties and to furthering the best interests of MICROSOFT. I understand that my duties include comploying with MICROSOFT's policies as published in the MICROSOFT Employee Handbook and as amended from time to time in MICROSOFT's sole discretion, including without limitation MICROSOFT's policies regarding disclosure of and approval of work outside MICROSOFT ("moonlighting" activities). During my employment, I will not engage in any activity or investment that (a) conflicts with MICROSOFT's business interests, (b) occupies my attention so as to interfere with the proper and efficient performance of my duties for MICROSOFT, or (c) interferes with the independent exercise of my judgment in MICROSOFT's best interests. An investment of less than 1% of the shares of a company traded on a registered stock exchange is not a violation of this paragraph, so long as my investment activity is consistent with MICROSOFT's policies.
2. Employment Terminable At Will, With or Without Cause. I acknowlege and agree that my employement with MICROSOFT is not for any specific or minimum term, that its continuation is subject to MICROSOFT's and my mutual consent, and that it is terminable at will, meaning that either MICROSOFT or I will be free to terminate my employment at any time, for any reason or no reason, with or without cause, and with or without notice, pre-termination warning or discipline, or other pre- or post-termination procedures of any kind. I acknowledge and agree that any prior representations to the contrary are void and superseded by this Agreement. I am not entitled to rely and I shall not rely on any future representations to the contrary, whether written or verbal, express or implied by any statement, conduct, policy, handbook, guideline or practice of MICROSOFT or its employees or agents. Any such future contrary representations will not modify this Agreement or my at-will status. Notwithstanding the foregoing and paragraph 15 below, my at-will status may be modified only by a formal written "Employment Contract" signed by me and by an officer of MICROSOFT and containing language expressly stating MICROSOFT's agreement to modify the terms of this Agreement and my at-will status.
3. Non-Disclosure. During my employement and at all times thereafter, I will neither disclose to anyone outside MICROSOFT nor use for any purpose other than my work for MICROSOFT (a) any confidential or proprietary information or trade secrets of MICROSOFT or its subsidiaries or (b) any information received by MICROSOFT or its subsidiars from others that the recipient is obligated to treat as confidential or proprietary. In addition, I will not disclose confidential or proprietary infromation or trade secrets to other MICROSOFT employees except on a "need-to-know" basis. For purposes of this paragraph and paragraphs 9 and 10, "confidential or proprietary information or trade secrets" means all data and information in whatever form, tangible or intangible, that is not generally known to the public and that relates to the business, technology, practices, products, marketing, sales, services, finances, or legal affairs of MICROSOFT or its subsidiaries or any third party doing business with or providing information to MICROSOFT or its subsidiaries, including without limitation information about actual or prospective customers, suppliers and business partners; non-public information about employees, such as contact information, job duties or descriptions, compensation and performance; business, sales, marketing, technical, financial and legal plans, proposals and projections; and concepts, techniques, processes,
Demanding software audits from public schools right before exams so that you can extort money from them is shameful and bullying. It's shameful to do anything but GIVE to schools. It's sick that anyone could get so twisted up in IP propaganda that they think such tactics are justified or even laudable. The real extortion is not the $300,000 or the five million dollars it cost to comply with the audit and "upgrade", it's the implied threat to all other schools, "If you don't please us and do as we say, we can and will screw you too." It's impossible for any organization to keep all of the records required to prove software "ownership" when you use M$ cruft. The costs are prohibitive and the evidence of "infringement" required to trigger a raid are laughably low. The effort itself is a waste of public funds as is use of non free software in general but that's what extortion is all about.
Don't worry, you can't fool all the people all the time. The BSA can spout whatever it likes, fools like you can quote it and even believe it, but their power is ebbing. Soon people will be able to look back and wonder how anyone could be so foolish as to have bought commercial software when free software worked as well. They will be disgusted if they are reminded of BSA public school raids and all the trouble caused.
I don't shoplift but that's a very funny analogy. Walmart has never demanded that I prove that I actually bought everything inside my house or been given a search warrent because I've been a customer. Walmart does not run advertisements begging people to falsely accuse their peers, employers even family of shoplifting. The propaganda war waged by the BSA has been successful in securing privileges for their industry that would be considered intolerable and unconstitutional elsewhere.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.