I know where you are coming from -- Office 97 broke the outline list feature -- something to do with HTML compatibility. I preferred the 95/v4 way of doing things.
But life moves on -- I like Word 2003 because of the Style Palette, a pretty trivial feature but one that save mouse clicks.
Do you really want all that H-dot-whatever-gobbledeygook that your oddball IT guys are talking about? After all, that's what *Apple* uses. You don't want an Apple technology, do you?
Life must be interesting on your planet, Dave.
First of all, video file formats are hardly a concern of "IT" -- this is really all being hashed out in Hollywood boardrooms, and is completely offtopic in a discussion about MS Office.
Second, it really boils down to either giving Dolby a bunch of money or giving Microsoft a bunch of money -- the relative "openness" of one side or another is all politics between the content and device vendors and not something us peons should be overly concerned with. Us slashdotters are downloading Divxes and don't really matter in this disucssion.
And finally, your fantasy about Anti-Apple Zealots doing whatever the opposite of Apple does is humorously delusional. I will say that there is a user resistance to QuickTime-based video, but that's mainly because the player sucks, and not because people have any particular opinion about Apple (other than they produce a crappy player).
The future profitibility of MS Office is as a component of network groupware systems. Because if you are primarily using Office in standalone mode, you are just fine with any version of Office released in the last 8 years. So, the "value" has to be in improved collaboration or document management.
In this respect, Microsoft needs open formats just as much as anyone. Ever try to write a server-based system that reads information from DOC files? Using winword.exe with automation just doesn't really work. XML lets MS use a relatively lightweight parser in a server-based system.
Oh, and changing the default fileformat will surely spur some upgrades, but from what I've seen the corporate market is generally not in a big hurry to get onto the latest version of Office. I don't foresee a repeat of Office 97.
Agreed -- That gets the real issue. Not IE7, but the fact W2K is going into "extended support" 1-2 years before Longhorn ships. If anything, it should be the other way around -- companies should have at least a solid year to evaulate Longhorn before being moved off 2K.
Most corporations running W2K were early adopters for Microsoft, companies who either moved quickly onto 2K or upgraded from NT4. WinXP was sold as a consumer upgrade that provided almost no additional features for the corp user, so they passed. Now they (we) are being punished for the fact that Longhorn is years behind schedule. W2K might be old, but it's users are very entrenched customers.
Note, normally I wouldnt stand for people bitching about a 5-6 year old OS, but in this case Microsoft has not delievered an upgrade and should extend the support window until they do.
Microsoft does spread FUD. Microsoft does pre-announce products and over-promise on release dates.
However, Microsoft also has an extrodinary history of actually delivering what they promised to (eventually). People thought that Windows 95 was technically impossible, but they shipped it. People thought NT5 (2000) would never see the light of day. Even Cairo 's announced features mostly shipped, in bits and pieces. Historically, you could take a MS product plan to the bank, which kept customers loyal to MS's direction.
That Longhorn seems to be proceeding so aimlessly and as such a soft target indicates a management breakdown. They used to be quite good with delivering large projects up there -- did the talent cash out?
There's plenty of other news sources besides NYTimes. Plenty!
Really? Who does technology coverage on the level of the NY Times? Seriously. CNet? Everyone else just burps up press-releases and recycles other stories.
Slashdot is already so desperate for content that they are linking to moronic blogs where studnets regurgitate baseless Apple specuation or ramble on about dull Linux World Domination theories.
Eventually there will be so little original, quality content on the Internet that Slashdot will be forced to link to posts in their own comments section.
The profit for the local affiliates is not really in broadcasting the shows, it's in the local news programs that come on after the shows. Until they figure out how to keep your butt in the seat in a Video-On-Demand sceanrio, they're going to fight this.
At least in my area, ALL of the broadcast stations owned by the network companies. Yet they still make a big deal out of local news. I imagine with the current ownership rules, this is a pretty common situation.
The question is how can organizations with no capital get into a very capital-intensive industry? They could have a revolution and put the means of production under the control of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
As it stands there's at least 4-5 companies that produce Intel/IBM PC-compatible machines.
He's the designer of VMS and famous for saying Unix is junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s. I think he was mainly a commercial programmer and probably not involved with the Unix Hater club.
they could have gone the route of a 'nix for their advanced products (Windows 95 and beyond) but for some reason decided they weren't interested.
My understanding is that Microsoft wanted to sell Xenix to IBM as the "advanced PC OS". They even made a lot of changes to DOS 2 to make it more Unix-like. IBM wanted instead to develop OS/2 from scratch. The conspiracy was that IBM wanted to make damn sure that PCs did not support a multiuser timesharing OS in order to protect their midrange systems. So, MS spun off SCO, more or less.
Also MS has always been the one collecting per-computer license fees, literally since day 1. I'm sure they did not like they idea of paying per-computer license fees to AT&T. Eventually they hired Dave Cutler to write NT, and he's infamous as a Unix-hater. By 1995 they had an OS that was as capable as Unix, at least on paper.
Maybe I've been an Apple Customer too long to "keep the faith", but Apple has always been about providing value on the high end, and, well, ummm, (don't mod me down), crippling the low end. Which is not to say either the LC was or the Mini is a bad computer, just that it's engineered to keep it into certain market segments.
The thing about the open IBM-compatible market is that if a company gets too jealous of their margins, someone else will knock them off. This happened to IBM, Compaq, and others.
In "Triumph of the Nerds" it was revealed that IBM only had an Apple II with a MS Softcard running "Microsoft CP/M". So IBM was so clueless that didn't even know that MS was just reselling CP/M, and Bill Gates had to give them Digital Research's contact information.
Apple never really had the manufacturing capacity or logistics to dominate the PC market. Even before IBM came on the scene, they'd basically ceded the low-end of the market to Atari and Commodore.
20 years ago they were technologically dominating the market, but as soon as they decided they weren't going to commodify and license their designs, they were pretty much relegated to the "up-market" niche they hold today. Apple could barely supply their own market -- as people "wised up" to them, they responded by jacking up their margins to a gianormous size to keep the demand down. Which is a perfectly fine business strategy, but you won't get 90% marketshare that way.
The needs of the masses had to be supplied by open hardware, there was simply no other way. If anything Linux follows the Microsoft model rather than the Apple/Sun one -- run everywhere people want it to run.
Nah, Taco is just too lazy to enable the HTML editing feature built into IE & Mozilla. We use it all the time for the webapps at work. But, I suppose typing HTML tags (including breaks in one mode!) has a nerdy charm.
(You present yourself as a hardliner Groklaw fanboy/girl, so perhaps it isn't worth responding, but...)
Groklaw does indeed focus on legal commentary, but it also somewhat frequently turns into a "blowhard blog". There quite a few lengthy deconstructions of trade journal articles (not necessarily related to SCO/IBM), and often just blatant editorializing, particularly with regard to Sun Micro.
Claiming that "every commentary" is footnoted legal discussion is just plainly false, and I'm not sure why regular Growlaw readers keep insisting it is true.
I guess the attraction of Groklaw wore off for me when the word "FUD" started to get tossed around inconsequentially (particularly when the original piece seemed to be well meaning), and I started reading J Anonymous Paralegal's opinions on Sun's enterprise business strategy. Once you get out of the legal beagle realm, the identity of the commentator becomes more relevant (to me anyway).
When Microsoft wrote their own kernel, *BSD was essentially obsolete, and System V UNIX was ridiclously expensive. FreeBSD is is just now adding features that were in the NT Kernel 10 years ago.
Now they've got decades worth of software designed for the very non-Unix NT kernel, so switching isn't much of an option, nor would it necessarily produce better peformance or stability.
had they gone the Apple route. Can you imagine how different things would be if they had released a Unix-based OS
Apple sells a fairly medicore Unix where all the value is proprietary API layers. I can imagine that if Microsoft had done this, they would have been tarred-and-feathered by the Unix world for Embrace-and-Extending Unix -- rather than accepted like Apple is. Lose-Lose situation.
And it wouldn't that much different either -- Windows users would still be running proprietary Win32 in orange windows and would be just as ignorant of any kernel-level features.
But, I bet the margin on that lowend PowerMac is ridiclous. A system with those basic specs should cost about $1000 and would still have great margins.
One thing that's always bothered me about Apple is how their product line is designed to punish you if you don't see things their way (iMacs or Duals -- I want neither!).
Well, I've got a Quadra 950 in my junkpile, so I can't disagree with the emotional attachment. But that computer was easily $10,000 as shipped. Which is one big reason Mac users percieve that their machines last longer -- they paid more for them and got better equipment. I don't know how well that applies to eMacs/Minis though.
Apple hasn't sold a motherboard upgrade in many years. and back when they did (mid 90s), it was 80% of the price of a new system. Don't get your hopes up that any iMac logic board will be economic to upgrade even if possibly possible to do so.
doing an upgrade on a PC frequently requires installing an almost completely new system
I agree, PCs are so cheap nowdays that upgrades make little sense in most cases (unless you are trying to improve Intel Inside video or something). Just buy a new one in 2 years.
I don't doubt that a 20" iMac is in my future
And then you go and destroy your own point out of the water by hyping a future boat anchor with a nice $500 LCD permenently attached.:)
[I actually have some sort of point here -- Apple's pricing isn't that different from the PC market, but they sell more expensive all-in-one bundles, which have higher profit margins, but also tend to retard how quickly Apple users replace their machines. And that inflates resale values.
Oh, before anyone commments, there's no special Macmagic which makes the machines last longer -- it's all the pricing/specs of the current lineup which 'value' the older machines. Old PCs are expendible because new PCs are really fast and really cheap.]
That's the reason, but still an almost enirely artificial one. Apple is obviously ignoring a fairly big range of prices/configurations in order to make a nice clean sepration between consumer and higher margin pro machines.
The good thing about today's comparison is that this is the first iMac in years which doesn't seem like it was deliberately underspeced to keep it out of PowerMac territory.
Slashdot Mirror
In retrospect, he lives on Planet Troll, where a discussion about MS Office gets twisted into Apple/Dolby Advocacy Hour. Well, I bit.
I know where you are coming from -- Office 97 broke the outline list feature -- something to do with HTML compatibility. I preferred the 95/v4 way of doing things.
But life moves on -- I like Word 2003 because of the Style Palette, a pretty trivial feature but one that save mouse clicks.
Do you really want all that H-dot-whatever-gobbledeygook that your oddball IT guys are talking about? After all, that's what *Apple* uses. You don't want an Apple technology, do you?
Life must be interesting on your planet, Dave.
First of all, video file formats are hardly a concern of "IT" -- this is really all being hashed out in Hollywood boardrooms, and is completely offtopic in a discussion about MS Office.
Second, it really boils down to either giving Dolby a bunch of money or giving Microsoft a bunch of money -- the relative "openness" of one side or another is all politics between the content and device vendors and not something us peons should be overly concerned with. Us slashdotters are downloading Divxes and don't really matter in this disucssion.
And finally, your fantasy about Anti-Apple Zealots doing whatever the opposite of Apple does is humorously delusional. I will say that there is a user resistance to QuickTime-based video, but that's mainly because the player sucks, and not because people have any particular opinion about Apple (other than they produce a crappy player).
The future profitibility of MS Office is as a component of network groupware systems. Because if you are primarily using Office in standalone mode, you are just fine with any version of Office released in the last 8 years. So, the "value" has to be in improved collaboration or document management.
In this respect, Microsoft needs open formats just as much as anyone. Ever try to write a server-based system that reads information from DOC files? Using winword.exe with automation just doesn't really work. XML lets MS use a relatively lightweight parser in a server-based system.
Oh, and changing the default fileformat will surely spur some upgrades, but from what I've seen the corporate market is generally not in a big hurry to get onto the latest version of Office. I don't foresee a repeat of Office 97.
Agreed -- That gets the real issue. Not IE7, but the fact W2K is going into "extended support" 1-2 years before Longhorn ships. If anything, it should be the other way around -- companies should have at least a solid year to evaulate Longhorn before being moved off 2K.
Most corporations running W2K were early adopters for Microsoft, companies who either moved quickly onto 2K or upgraded from NT4. WinXP was sold as a consumer upgrade that provided almost no additional features for the corp user, so they passed. Now they (we) are being punished for the fact that Longhorn is years behind schedule. W2K might be old, but it's users are very entrenched customers.
Note, normally I wouldnt stand for people bitching about a 5-6 year old OS, but in this case Microsoft has not delievered an upgrade and should extend the support window until they do.
Microsoft does spread FUD. Microsoft does pre-announce products and over-promise on release dates.
However, Microsoft also has an extrodinary history of actually delivering what they promised to (eventually). People thought that Windows 95 was technically impossible, but they shipped it. People thought NT5 (2000) would never see the light of day. Even Cairo 's announced features mostly shipped, in bits and pieces. Historically, you could take a MS product plan to the bank, which kept customers loyal to MS's direction.
That Longhorn seems to be proceeding so aimlessly and as such a soft target indicates a management breakdown. They used to be quite good with delivering large projects up there -- did the talent cash out?
There's plenty of other news sources besides NYTimes. Plenty!
Really? Who does technology coverage on the level of the NY Times? Seriously. CNet? Everyone else just burps up press-releases and recycles other stories.
Slashdot is already so desperate for content that they are linking to moronic blogs where studnets regurgitate baseless Apple specuation or ramble on about dull Linux World Domination theories.
Eventually there will be so little original, quality content on the Internet that Slashdot will be forced to link to posts in their own comments section.
The google term you are looking for is "rich text",
Here's a free one:
http://www.kevinroth.com/rte/demo.htm
Although it's not particularly hard to roll your own.
The profit for the local affiliates is not really in broadcasting the shows, it's in the local news programs that come on after the shows. Until they figure out how to keep your butt in the seat in a Video-On-Demand sceanrio, they're going to fight this.
At least in my area, ALL of the broadcast stations owned by the network companies. Yet they still make a big deal out of local news. I imagine with the current ownership rules, this is a pretty common situation.
The question is how can organizations with no capital get into a very capital-intensive industry? They could have a revolution and put the means of production under the control of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
As it stands there's at least 4-5 companies that produce Intel/IBM PC-compatible machines.
He's the designer of VMS and famous for saying Unix is junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s. I think he was mainly a commercial programmer and probably not involved with the Unix Hater club.
they could have gone the route of a 'nix for their advanced products (Windows 95 and beyond) but for some reason decided they weren't interested.
My understanding is that Microsoft wanted to sell Xenix to IBM as the "advanced PC OS". They even made a lot of changes to DOS 2 to make it more Unix-like. IBM wanted instead to develop OS/2 from scratch. The conspiracy was that IBM wanted to make damn sure that PCs did not support a multiuser timesharing OS in order to protect their midrange systems. So, MS spun off SCO, more or less.
Also MS has always been the one collecting per-computer license fees, literally since day 1. I'm sure they did not like they idea of paying per-computer license fees to AT&T. Eventually they hired Dave Cutler to write NT, and he's infamous as a Unix-hater. By 1995 they had an OS that was as capable as Unix, at least on paper.
Ahhh, it just wouldn't be Slashdot without the myopic nitpickers with poor reading comprehension.
Make up my mind? You conceded your argument, not very politely.
LC.
Maybe I've been an Apple Customer too long to "keep the faith", but Apple has always been about providing value on the high end, and, well, ummm, (don't mod me down), crippling the low end. Which is not to say either the LC was or the Mini is a bad computer, just that it's engineered to keep it into certain market segments.
The thing about the open IBM-compatible market is that if a company gets too jealous of their margins, someone else will knock them off. This happened to IBM, Compaq, and others.
In "Triumph of the Nerds" it was revealed that IBM only had an Apple II with a MS Softcard running "Microsoft CP/M". So IBM was so clueless that didn't even know that MS was just reselling CP/M, and Bill Gates had to give them Digital Research's contact information.
Apple never really had the manufacturing capacity or logistics to dominate the PC market. Even before IBM came on the scene, they'd basically ceded the low-end of the market to Atari and Commodore.
20 years ago they were technologically dominating the market, but as soon as they decided they weren't going to commodify and license their designs, they were pretty much relegated to the "up-market" niche they hold today. Apple could barely supply their own market -- as people "wised up" to them, they responded by jacking up their margins to a gianormous size to keep the demand down. Which is a perfectly fine business strategy, but you won't get 90% marketshare that way.
The needs of the masses had to be supplied by open hardware, there was simply no other way. If anything Linux follows the Microsoft model rather than the Apple/Sun one -- run everywhere people want it to run.
Nah, Taco is just too lazy to enable the HTML editing feature built into IE & Mozilla. We use it all the time for the webapps at work. But, I suppose typing HTML tags (including breaks in one mode!) has a nerdy charm.
(You present yourself as a hardliner Groklaw fanboy/girl, so perhaps it isn't worth responding, but ...)
Groklaw does indeed focus on legal commentary, but it also somewhat frequently turns into a "blowhard blog". There quite a few lengthy deconstructions of trade journal articles (not necessarily related to SCO/IBM), and often just blatant editorializing, particularly with regard to Sun Micro.
Claiming that "every commentary" is footnoted legal discussion is just plainly false, and I'm not sure why regular Growlaw readers keep insisting it is true.
I guess the attraction of Groklaw wore off for me when the word "FUD" started to get tossed around inconsequentially (particularly when the original piece seemed to be well meaning), and I started reading J Anonymous Paralegal's opinions on Sun's enterprise business strategy. Once you get out of the legal beagle realm, the identity of the commentator becomes more relevant (to me anyway).
When Microsoft wrote their own kernel, *BSD was essentially obsolete, and System V UNIX was ridiclously expensive. FreeBSD is is just now adding features that were in the NT Kernel 10 years ago.
Now they've got decades worth of software designed for the very non-Unix NT kernel, so switching isn't much of an option, nor would it necessarily produce better peformance or stability.
had they gone the Apple route. Can you imagine how different things would be if they had released a Unix-based OS
Apple sells a fairly medicore Unix where all the value is proprietary API layers. I can imagine that if Microsoft had done this, they would have been tarred-and-feathered by the Unix world for Embrace-and-Extending Unix -- rather than accepted like Apple is. Lose-Lose situation.
And it wouldn't that much different either -- Windows users would still be running proprietary Win32 in orange windows and would be just as ignorant of any kernel-level features.
But, I bet the margin on that lowend PowerMac is ridiclous. A system with those basic specs should cost about $1000 and would still have great margins.
One thing that's always bothered me about Apple is how their product line is designed to punish you if you don't see things their way (iMacs or Duals -- I want neither!).
Well, I've got a Quadra 950 in my junkpile, so I can't disagree with the emotional attachment. But that computer was easily $10,000 as shipped. Which is one big reason Mac users percieve that their machines last longer -- they paid more for them and got better equipment. I don't know how well that applies to eMacs/Minis though.
Apple hasn't sold a motherboard upgrade in many years. and back when they did (mid 90s), it was 80% of the price of a new system. Don't get your hopes up that any iMac logic board will be economic to upgrade even if possibly possible to do so.
doing an upgrade on a PC frequently requires installing an almost completely new system
:)
I agree, PCs are so cheap nowdays that upgrades make little sense in most cases (unless you are trying to improve Intel Inside video or something). Just buy a new one in 2 years.
I don't doubt that a 20" iMac is in my future
And then you go and destroy your own point out of the water by hyping a future boat anchor with a nice $500 LCD permenently attached.
[I actually have some sort of point here -- Apple's pricing isn't that different from the PC market, but they sell more expensive all-in-one bundles, which have higher profit margins, but also tend to retard how quickly Apple users replace their machines. And that inflates resale values.
Oh, before anyone commments, there's no special Macmagic which makes the machines last longer -- it's all the pricing/specs of the current lineup which 'value' the older machines. Old PCs are expendible because new PCs are really fast and really cheap.]
Expandability?
That's the reason, but still an almost enirely artificial one. Apple is obviously ignoring a fairly big range of prices/configurations in order to make a nice clean sepration between consumer and higher margin pro machines.
The good thing about today's comparison is that this is the first iMac in years which doesn't seem like it was deliberately underspeced to keep it out of PowerMac territory.