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."
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
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
"...functionality as embedding multimedia or animations into your documents."
So, do you have to print those out as flipbooks or what?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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!
Embedding multimedia and animations into word processed documents is *simple functionality*?
When was the last time you jammed a Quicktime into your TPS cover sheet?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
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.
...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?
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!
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...
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?
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
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/20/ms_history /
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
Mod Doesn't understand sarcasm -1
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."
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.
you've played right into their hands... things posted to the net are now considered "Microsoft Internal".
:)
!!!!
-pyrrho
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!
" "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.
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.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!!
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.
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
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.
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.
"What are you talking about? Word does have it, and always has IIRC. Click the paragraph icon on the toolbar or go to Tools->Options and set exactly which codes you want to see."
Obviously you've never used Wordperfect or you would realize that it has far superior code markup viewing. Word perfect codes are similar to HTML markup to a certain extent: they have a start and end tag and can be deleted and moved as well. It is very easy to figure out a formatting problem by just looking at the codes.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
I wonder which company is jealously guarding their file formats now... I wonder how MS Word would have grown if the DMCA existed then.
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!
$300K. Wow. Thats an astounding chunk of change. Let's see now, the LA Unified School District's 2003 budget was $403 million dollars (out of just under $5 billion in revenue), while Microsoft's total revenue figures for the same year were $32 billion dollars.
Even ignoring (for your argument's sake) that it's legal to pirate and steal commercial software, and even assuming that the school district indeed paid $5M (which is not true), $300K is equal to 4 hours of budget expenditures by the district and 1/29th of a day's revenue for Microsoft. So I have trouble reconciling this with your claim that "Microsoft is stealing from children", as if some kids in San Mateo were denied their lunch so Microsoft could pad their books.
BTW, just in case you fail to read the BSA press release, here's a relevant quote:
I suggest you send a nastygram to all these companies for their part in the "extortion" of "cash-strapped" schools.Thanks for the opening, I love looking up links like these.
Want some more, bugni man?
It's Bungi, please. And yes, sure. Hit me again.
That Microsoft has bullied cash strapped public schools over copying stupid stuff like M$ Word is a shameful matter of public record
I think we've taken care of the "cash strapped" part. That you consider "M$ Word" to be "stupid" is another matter, and I don't see how enforcement of a license is "shameful" or "bullying", except from your peculiar point of view. I suppose you also believe that "sharing" copyrighted music is A-OK. Do you regularly shoplift at Wal-Mart as well?
Free software, of course, comes with no such strings attached
Of course it doesn't! That's why the LA School District dumped "M$" and went to Free Software in 1998, right? They did that, right? I mean, since "M$" "bullied them" to the tune of "$5M" and essentially bankrupted them, they must have dumped "Windoze" and gone to Debian. In 1998. Right?
I'm happy people like you and him are bothered by my little posts.
No, not bothered. Merely amused. Entertained at seeing you trip all over your bogus arguments, certainly.