Amazing that a company like Adobe could have pulled this off! Must have been a really good product in that they didn't have control over the OS so they couldn't bundle any program and spread it that way. It had to be truly a great product. If the OS manufacturer had pushed their own version, one might say "Hmm, but what about other products out there?" Here we have an independent third party coming up with their own product and it was succesful. This is a good thing.
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I'm assuming that you're being sarcastic, but just in case: no, it's not amazing. The product was sorely needed. As was Netscape at its time.
The fact that Adobe has the resources to market their product and eagerly did so helps too.
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Wow, Microsoft is so good and caring to everyone. They have decided on a better standard, and will ship the client software to everyone, all because it's better for them! God bless Bill Gates. They have, once again, decided on software that is good for us and we will see that it's a great product and adopt it. Amazing, and the fact that Microsoft controls the OS market has nothing to do with the proliferation of xdocs. Nothing at all. Not one bit.
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The market is not about morals, it's not about "good" and not about "bad". "Great products" are defined by customer satisfaction and the availability of other offers.
It's the customers who decide that using the cheap/free, less complete product is better for them overall. It's them who decide whether to pay for an antivirus, a terminal emulator, an http browser or a web server if it's sound business to them.
In order to make it sound business for the customers, Microsoft is forced to at least satisfy their basic needs. The proliferation of an alternative is impossible if the product cannot compete by itself... the monopoly is an unfair advantage to the product, but it doesn't MAKE the product.
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This is very true. Microsoft provides everyone with very cheap products. Of course they do have an illegal monopoly as determined by the court. And, if you studied economics, this means that their market is a cash cow for them. They can easily offer cheaper products and beat out competitors this way. IE is cheaper than netscape, same with xdocs. This is what's great about a monopoly, you reap the benefits of the monopoly by jacking up prices(this was established in court) then provide cheap if not free products/services to rid yourself of competition ie keeping a monopoly. You're exactly right. The consumer is getting a free and adequate product. At the same time, other companies are not allowed to innovate. Microsoft can innovate within the windows market, but others cannot because Microsoft controls what is / what is not bundled.
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Anyone who has studied economics knows that monopolies are not that simple to classify as evil, nor that simple to dissolve. Their effects are more confusing and subtle, particularly when it comes to prove that the consumers have been effectively harmed (which is the only thing that matters in monopoly regulation).
Monopolies are centralizations of economic power, and their respective problems and advantages are the same of a government-based centralized economy: the monopoly regulates the market, consciously or unconsciously. Of course, they have a strong motivation to do so consciously in spite of its illegality.
Microsoft's monopoly has had a number of negative effects on the industry, with material, effective damage to consumers. The difficulties of proving this damage in the DOJ case were a direct consequence of choosing Netscape as the poster boy of monopoly victimhood.
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The key is anti-competitive. Microsoft was found guilty of using its monopoly powers to displace competitors like Netscape by bundling its browser with the OS.
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What you don't seem to notice is that that is not the key. It's completely NOT the point. It's off-topic.
It's like shooting someone in the head and blaming his death on his unhealthy diet and chronic alcoholism. Yes, it may have been killing him for years, but it's the bullet that really nailed him.
"Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?". IF XDOCS IS A COMPETITION TO PDF: YES, ALL THE ONES THAT MATTER.
Why? Because not even a monopoly can sell a non-product; for MS to push an alternative, even if it's free, it has to be good enough to be worth it.
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If you were able to comprehend written English you would know that I was not referring to Z, but the qualifier "may have".. This brings into doubt Y, when in fact it's a fact that Y actually occured, so "may have" is incorrect.. if we're talking about proper use of English, of course.
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All right, let's flame away: If you were able to comprehend English properly you would know that I knew exactly what you were referring to, and that I was criticizing precisely the parsing that led you to that interpretation.
The English language includes figures of speech that cannot be directly translated to prepositional calculus. The figure " X may be, but Z is still true" is one of those expressions.
But then again, perhaps you really do mean "proper" English as in a formalized canon that supersedes the informal conventions that people have been evolving for centuries. However, although I know of authorities for proper French, Spanish, Basque and others, I am not familiar with the Academy of the English Language, perhaps you could point me to their offices?
--- Have fun modding another post of yours up to 2! ---
Yes, because clicking on the "No Score +1 Bonus" box on each one of my comments would make me so morally superior.
Ok, let's say some other company, let's call it "Company Z" decides to create a competitor to the PDF format. It's completely open, the software to create PDF files is free. But wait, how are they going to spread their viewing application code to users? Oh no! They can't! In theory you would like to say "This is the best product out there so people will use it." So Company Z puts it on the web but no one downloads it.. even though it's the best product! Heaven forbid! ----
Let's give Z an interesting name in the experiment... hmm... yes, let's call it, Adobe. And let's call the product "PDF", the viewer "Acrobat" and force everyone who wants to read it to download the free reader from the then awfully slow Internet...
Yes, of course this business model could never work.
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So in other words, Microsoft is using its momentum in the OS market in order to provide a competing product to users. It may be nice, but what about the even better products which don't have the luxury of bundling software with the OS?
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This invites a couple of questions which are at the root the same:
I) As a consumer, WHY DO I CARE about the "poor products" ? II) IF these products are so much better, IN WHAT SENSE?
A product is only "better" if it is a better match for the needs of the customer. If, from the point of view of the consumer the products are equivalent, the consumer doesn't care about what happens to the non-preferred product. Nor should he/she care.
Yet another example (actually, the same I've been using for other things here): the OS comes integrated with a free, fully functional HTML document viewer. Hey, it even includes scripting capabilities, or the ability to run full Java applications if I want. There's even a pletorah of free/cheap HTML authoring tools to design my documents. It's free, and it's everywhere!
Why would I, the consumer, ever look for a non-integrated, expensive solution for my documents?
Personally, I rarely do. 99% of the time, for me typical document creation (Word/Powerpoint) is functionally equivalent to HTML, and so I use HTML.
But I'm not a typical case. For the typical case, HTML is wholly inadequate for their documents, and they need MSOffice, OpenOffice, StarOffice or whatever they choose. They pay the money, install the gigabytes of software, run the bloated thing and produce... a memo.
Word could be technologically speaking more complete than any HTML authoring tool, but from my point of view it suffers of "featuritis". From the point of view of the typical Office user, HTML lacks crucial features. From the point of view of the typical publisher, BOTH technologies are completely inadequate.
The point is that "better product", functionally speaking, is mostly decided by the consumer according to their needs, and it usually means that which satisfies their minimum requrirements for the minimal price with the minimal effort.
If they can make do with Office they don't care about PDF. If they can do with HTML they don't care about Office products. If they can do with Explorer they don't care about Netscape.
Why should they? A personal hovercraft would be really nice, superior technology, but why should I have to pay 200K for one if I can happily make do with a car?
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Better product? Hmm, I seem to remember Microsoft rushing IE out the door and creating an extremely buggy product.. In fact both were equally buggy. ---
You are both correct and incorrect.
Internet Explorer 1-3 was a rushed piece of crap. It was even buggier than Netscape, messy, and lacking features.
Also, it was not integrated with the OS in any way, and it was tremendously unpopular. Nobody used it.
Internet Explorer 4 came tightly integrated with the Win98 OS, quickly became very popular, and is considered in general to be Netscape's "killer".
It was also a well-featured, polished product. Much, much more stable than Netscape, in spite of being a more complicated product tightly coupled with the OS.
Since this is the one that took the market share from Netscape, and this is the one that is considered an anti-competitive case, versions 1-3 are as irrelevant to the discussion as they were to the market.
--- And may have played unfairly? No, it's a fact that they did play unfairly ---
You seem to be unfamiliar with certain expressions of the English language. Expressions of the form "Subject X MAY have done Y, but Z is still true" are used not to question the validity of Y, but to point out that the result Z is not affected by whether it's true or not.
You don't get it still. In order to replace PDF, it would still have to be able to compete with PDF in the eyes of the users.
You want a client application that views a document format in every PC? You already have it. If you have Windows, click on that blue "e" somewhere in the desktop.
Microsoft has integrated at different points RTF, Word format, Internet Explorer (and its own brand of HTML/XHTML and ActiveX), etc. into the OS.
Most of the document producers are still using MS Office to create these documents (remember that whole monopoly thing?) and using the native format for internal consumption. That's why they need products to export these documents to PDF.
Why would they use PDF instead, imposing the burden on their users of downloading and installing Acrobat, etc? Simply because they need what PDF provides as a document format. They need it so badly that it has become a necessity.
Anything that competes with PDF would have to provide the useful features of PDF, otherwise it won't succeed. The "everyone is using it" won't work because "everyone is using already PDF too, and it actually works" will be the response.
If MS hopes that the users would accept a merely adequate product for a lower price ("gratis"), they're probably right. MS may want to sacrifice profit and give it away to get market share if they want, but they'll also have to deliver a decent product in the process.
The fact that there's already a legacy investment, that transparency and openness are currently valued features of the PDF product, means that it will be forced to "open" its alternative to compete (in the same sense, and with the same quote-unquote, that it had to do with.NET to compete with Java).
Is that really so bad?
Consider that PDF is useful mostly because the other document formats are useless. If Microsoft provides a decent replacement integrated with Office, I would see it as fixing an incomplete product.
On the sidenote:
Of course they played dirty, just read the conclusions of the anti-trust judge. MS hid API's from Netscape so their software wasn't as good.
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And I assume that's what stopped Opera and other companies from developing better products?
Is that why Netscape crashed even more than Internet Explorer, in spite of it being a simpler, less integrated (and therefore less interacted with) product?
Microsoft may have unfairly given advantage to its product, and there are competitors in the market which would have fared better otherwise, but Netscape sucked by its own efforts.
The OS doesn't "check" each file. That would be prohibitive. At most it could check the bytestream as it is read from the disk, and (I'm not familiar with PDF details) it might not be clearly identifiable at the beginning. In some cases it might be worth it (executables could be checked for safety, for example), but even then it has its costs in speed, and for data it's irrational... are you willing to read that 600MB swapfile into memory before deciding which type it is?!
A file is a collection of data stored in the disk. About the only "typing" the OS normally has is whether that piece of data is "executable" or not.
What you suggest is a filesystem with metadata, which is not necessarily a bad idea, but it's not very popular these days and even where it's present it can only be much more general than that, providing a slot for information that applications can use. In Windows, and for compatibility reasons now many other OSes, there is only "pseudo-typing" by extensions in the filename, but this is merely a convention to facilitate "application integration" (mapping extensions to applications) since typing is only useful for applications.
The problem with putting this at such a low level as the OS is that the OS cannot, nor should it, know all the types of data/programs there can be. It's not its job. If it were, it would seriously limit the use of the machine.
Windows cannot "summarily delete all pdf files" because it cannot distinguish them that easily from other collections of bytes. Even if they are tagged with the PDF extension, it's not certain that it means it's a PDF, and if it assumes so, that doesn't delete the files that don't follow the convention (because they came from different filesystems, or because they were named, say, pdfv2 or something like that by Adobe).
This is just a matter of subtlety. Like lobotomizing your hyperactive kid, not only will it get you in trouble, but it will be a big obstacle for your own plans for the future.
You neglected the main point of my comment: the user demographics are different. For Average Joes, PDF is a read-only format, and it's not the Average Joes that Microsoft has to convert, it's the content producers.
Perhaps you might compare this to the effect that MS Internet Explorer "extensions" had on HTML, but that would require "embracing" PDF in order to "extend" it (and provide a default viewer for the "extensions").
This is no such case.
As a side note:
As a long-time Netscape user I'd say that is correct anyway.
Netscape didn't leave my computer until Internet Explorer became a better browser. Only recently has it returned.
Yes, Microsoft played dirty. Yes, it integrated Internet Explorer with the OS awfully. Yet Netscape 4.x was so bad that I preferred Internet Explorer IN SPITE of its integration (and the "browser crashes the computer for no reason" part).
For most users, PDF is a read-only format. They don't need to publish to PDF. Usually, they can't.
For them, MSOffice-formats are already the default and nothing is going to change that. This includes most intra-office file exchange.
And yet, PDF has met a particular need to the point where it is the standard publishing format. The people publishing to it USUALLY know a bit of what they're doing and are publishing to PDF (rather than Word2K) for a reason.
For them it's not going to be "killed" unless the alternative: I- Is at least as functional as PDF (for their needs). II- Can interoperate with PDF (convert back-and-forth) so that they don't lose their previous work. III- Is as "universal" as PDF (platform-wise). IV- The transition cost is low, or nil.
This points to an "open" standard (II, III, IV) with a cheap set of commercial tools (I, IV) and direct export support on commercial applications (IV).
In other words, to be a "killer" it has to be able to compete with PDF in the first place. It has to be either better, or cheaper, and probably both.
Are you saying that MS will put some code in their corresponding "read_file()" function that goes like:
if ( file.name.endsWith("pdf") || file_analyzer.matches(file, PDF_FORMAT) )
play_crappy_Flash_Metallica_Animation("PDF BAAD!")
Wouldn't that be a bit too much, running this for each file read?
I mean, as far as I know MS doesn't "support" PDF any more than it supports any other file format because, well, it's a FILE FORMAT.
Like Java, people still have to download an application (Adobe Acrobat) in order to read and use the files. Unlike Java, the lack of initial "default support" means that people understand that concept, download Acrobat and that's it. Acrobat then handles whatever "support" is needed.
Printed-doc file formats? Isn't this handled by the printer driver, such as a print-to-PDF-driver?
Surely MS doesn't want to take full responsability of hardware drivers these days, even if they're just printers! Or am I misreading the term?
Completely undercutting PDF would be, as you say, analogous to completely undercutting Navigator, and almost as unfeasible. It would require specifically engineering the OS to check every file (document or executable on each case), analyze it (is it PDF, or is it Navigator?) and sabotage it.
They would need a better excuse these days than they had for DR DOS, because they would be more suspect, it would be MUCH more obvious, it would affect negatively their clients more directly, it would be technically more expensive (check every file, not the running environment) and they have the money and resources to take the market in another way.
It would be like playing that trick against Harvard Graphics or Lotus back then, a bit too high-profile...
I don't think there has to be a problem with a common API for this anymore than there is for databases. Define an Adapter (driver) API and let other people code plug-ins/adapters to your system. Once there is critical mass and the corresponding demand, you'll probably want to provide an adapter yourself, or perhaps one of the external project grows up to the point of being trusted and stable.
Or are the differences in CMS implementation so radical that a driver system for communication cannot be devised?
Yes, it's visible right there. Has always been. Yet in the comments, now we have the [link.com] notation to avoid goatse links sneaking unto readers.
Why? Because we're LAZY. And because when we're reading Slashdot, we're not in our most intellectually aware (or porn-browsing paranoid) mood.
Almost flawlessly the "Free Registration required: blah blah blah" warning has been there, so at least I got used to the idea that if something similar wasn't there, I could click away.
Once more, not a matter of life-or-death. Just something NICE to do, to save a percentage of your users two clicks and an annoyance.
Yes, I'm sure Bill Gates personally has a black list in his office with the names of all Open Source advocates that have challenged his empire and every morning, at a strategic meeting with his closest advisors, he has a conversation like this:
- Bill, we have successfully increased the revenue of the company by 20%. We expect this to bring the stockholders to the level of optimism they had before the recession.
Bill: Yeah, yeah, whatever...
- Bill, our deals with the media conglomerates regarding DRM are proceeding flawlessly, ensuring that we are unopposed to push for the PC as the consumer device that coordinates everyone's information-related activities, including entertainment.
Bill: Sure. That's nice, I guess.
- Bill, our marketing campaign for Web Services is being successful among developers. Soon they will be tied to our standards and companies will have to consider Windows servers seriously for their large-scale network services.
Bill: What's wrong with you people? Is this what I pay you for?!
Silence.
Bill: Ok, who can answer the really important question? How close am I to fulfilling my personal vendetta against the Open Source Linux geeks? How many did we get fired today?
- I called HP yesterday morning. We got Bruce Perens fired.
Bill: Geek #427? EXCELLENT!
Bill takes list, draws little check mark on "#427 Bruce Perens" entry.
Bill: Ok. According to my list, "#428 Billy Tempherton" is next. He's a Linux administrator for a community college in Iowa that posted something about me being evil and Windows crashing his computer, at that Slashdot site in 1999...
- We're working on it, Sir!
Bill: Good! Meeting dismissed! I have to go to Slashdot and see who posted something against me today...
I know the "NY-Times Free Registration" horse is dead, but it would be nice to warn users that it's a NY Times link, even if it is the usual "Note: Free Registration, blah blah blah, stop pestering us we have more important duties here at Slashdot than editing content...". Or maybe even just a link[nytimes.com] notation.
Just so we don't bother.
It would be even nicer to provide an extra link if it exists. But I guess that IS asking way too much.
Well, I don't know about Microsoft, and I do know a lot of VB developers that hate VB.NET with all their guts, but I have to say I find it impressive for the same reasons they hate it: it's a language that forces OO design, uses modern libraries, and in the end it's all source code.
I'm not a big fan of VBisms such as "MustOverride", "MustInherit", "NotInheritable" etc, which can easily become unreadably verbose for my taste as you combine them, but after trying it out for a couple of simple apps as an experiment I find it an outstanding improvement over the original VB.
I think it's perfectly feasible to build a relatively big project in VB.NET without destroying some hardware and going on Prozac, as I would expect with any other VB.
Not that I would, but it has become a matter of taste or distaste for the VB-like syntax, not a major disfunctionality of the language itself.
VB.NET is a crutch. But it's a crutch that manages to fix VB as a language. I consider that an achievement, to say the least.
Heh. Depending on how "EE" is the "J2EE" server you're talking about, I might agree.
But since I'm very happy with the non-EJB part of J2EE in most app-servers/servlet-containers I have tried, I might be projecting my skepticism about EJB on the app-servers themselves and judging them on very limited experience.
On the blaming issue, copied and pasted from the original comment:
"It's not clear that MS killed Java on the client. In my opinion, Java was not ready for the client and therefore it killed itself with the Applet hype.
But that doesn't mean shooting a man dying of cancer is not a crime. "
I'm going to have to copy and paste this from my original comment to every reply to any thread on this story:
"It's not clear that MS killed Java on the client. In my opinion, Java was not ready for the client and therefore it killed itself with the Applet hype...But that doesn't mean shooting a man dying of cancer is not a crime."
Yes, Java's "write-once-compile-once-run-everywhere" was overhyped.
Yes, Java as a just-a-language has merit.
Yes, supporting Java because you hate MS or hating MS because you support Java is really, really stupid.
But I believe that Java without the JVM doesn't have as much merit as Java with the JVM, and it's not because of the cross-platform feature, that's a side-effect.
Was Java designed as a cross-platform language? My Java history may be fuzzy, but for some reason, I don't think that was a priority.
I think it was designed as a "network-oriented language", where arbitrary code could be sent back and forth through the network and run predictable in a relatively secure manner, even when data and code sources were not inherently trusted. Common bytecode and a standard VM would then be an implication of the requirement, not a requirement itself.
Does MS really believe in the need for cross-platform compatibility for their.NET initiative? I don't think so. But I think they need to implement a security model at the "language level" that satisfies the same requirements, and reached the same solution: implement the security model on a standard VM running the bytecode.
Now for the kind of things that a client does, particularly thick clients like we are used to, a lowest-common-denominator VM is idiotic, which is why Java was not ready for the complex-UI-client and may still not be (depending on the meaning of "complex" these days).
But for programs sending and servicing requests and passing objects around through an open network, the VM is a solution, and the lowest-common-denominator is not an issue.
Because Pascal died academically during the Java hype, not during the Delphi/VB hype.
Which is rather unfortunate, because if Delphi had been adopted as an educational language at the appropiate time, it would be stronger in the market and I really like the product. Also, it would have been a much better OO-educational language, in my opinion, than C++.
If you were talking about the software development platform, you would be correct.
However, the incompatibilities were in MS JVM, which was pre-installed in Windows.
This is on the user-side, and a user is as likely to notice the source of the problem, download and install a new JVM, as he/she is likely to download and install a new set of shared libraries.
A) The article was about Java's Death On The Client. Java's vital signs on the server side have, so far, not been disputed. Many developers also consider Java a better match for the server than for the GUI-oriented client.
B) Until recently a very significant portion of programming courses currently taught in Java were taught in Pascal. Java has been more popular in academic circles than C/C++ and Pascal, being as dead in its pure form as a language can be, was bound to be replaced by some OO language.
Java is not dead, but like Pascal, it could very well be dead in the Real World and still be the teaching language in a lot of programming courses.
"MORE compliant"? Compliant with what? The "Java" specification? Was it more Java than Java?
MS Java was, and is (because it's still out there and it's still a pain) NON-COMPLIANT, which means quirky, of unpredictable behavior, not-following the standard imposed by the brand which they licensed.
If I code an Applet using standard Java and it runs on every JVM except MS, MS Java is crippled. And that's the situation that prompted Sun's conflict with MS.
Ask any Java developer out there that has had to deploy Java Applets on the Internet, where you cannot force your users to download a standard (or non-standard) JRE unless you're willing to lose demographics. They have to target their Applets to either standard JVMs or MS JVMs, or spent code and debugging time testing both as if they were different platforms... because they are.
If your JVM cannot run my standard Java code unless I target it specifically, the JVM is crippled. If the code I target specifically on your JVM doesn't run exactly alike in other standard JVMs, your JVM is crippled (it requires non-portable non-cross-platform code).
Now, MS Java may have been faster (certain parts were), and may have been a nice language/VM set by itself. But it was not portable, not cross-platform, and it was not compliant with the Java specs. Which means it broke Java applications and MS legal obligations according to the license.
The typical argument for "MS Killed Java" is not that Java died because it was not included in Windows, but rather because it was included in a crippled way that misrepresented the language.
It would be the equivalent of Microsoft giving away a Linux distribution "MS Linux" that crashes often, doesn't run most of the GNU programs (gcc included), has a different set of C libraries with their own quirks, and uses a really old version of Gnome as a fixed, non-configurable GUI.
Then everyone would say "I tried Linux, it came with Windows, but it sucks" and it would take a lengthy, unwanted explanation to let them know that their "free Linux" was crippled. Even then most will never try it again.
It's not clear that MS killed Java on the client. In my opinion, Java was not ready for the client and therefore it killed itself with the Applet hype.
But that doesn't mean shooting a man dying of cancer is not a crime.
I think that you may have missed the connection between the different sets of diagrams in UML.
The use-cases don't stand by themselves. They just happen to be arguably the most high-level view of the application, and the closest to the process of answering the "what does the client want?" question.
The connection between the Class Diagrams and the Use Cases, from my point of view, is formed by the Sequence Diagrams. Each Sequence Diagram solves a Use Case through communications between entities from the Class Diagram.
The Sequence Diagrams translate quite directly to source code, and connects the source code to the Use Cases and therefore to the client's requirements.
Of course, that's assuming an ideal world where the requirements were correctly collected through the magic of Use Cases in the first place. More likely, by the time you get to Sequence Diagrams something is clearly terribly wrong and you have to correct the Use Cases and recollect requirements, etc.
The value of the Use Cases is not so much, I think, "making clear the requirements", but having a structured way of getting those requirements linked to the source code when you finally get them right.
What exactly is it that you cannot do with your source code in Visual Studio.NET?
I don't mean that the wisdom of MS has allowed them to put all functionality ever needed in Visual Studio.
I mean that every time I checked my source code was still there in a flat file, and I could modify it with a text editor, a perl script, or whatever I wanted.
I haven't seen any repository system from which I have to import/export source code or anything like that. Am I missing something?
Slashdot Mirror
you can just spend a few months trying to understand the source code so you can fix the bugs yourself and speed up performance, add new features, etc.
he hehe he he he HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... right...
Amazing that a company like Adobe could have pulled this off! Must have been a really good product in that they didn't have control over the OS so they couldn't bundle any program and spread it that way. It had to be truly a great product. If the OS manufacturer had pushed their own version, one might say "Hmm, but what about other products out there?" Here we have an independent third party coming up with their own product and it was succesful. This is a good thing.
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I'm assuming that you're being sarcastic, but just in case: no, it's not amazing. The product was sorely needed. As was Netscape at its time.
The fact that Adobe has the resources to market their product and eagerly did so helps too.
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Wow, Microsoft is so good and caring to everyone. They have decided on a better standard, and will ship the client software to everyone, all because it's better for them! God bless Bill Gates. They have, once again, decided on software that is good for us and we will see that it's a great product and adopt it. Amazing, and the fact that Microsoft controls the OS market has nothing to do with the proliferation of xdocs. Nothing at all. Not one bit.
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The market is not about morals, it's not about "good" and not about "bad". "Great products" are defined by customer satisfaction and the availability of other offers.
It's the customers who decide that using the cheap/free, less complete product is better for them overall. It's them who decide whether to pay for an antivirus, a terminal emulator, an http browser or a web server if it's sound business to them.
In order to make it sound business for the customers, Microsoft is forced to at least satisfy their basic needs. The proliferation of an alternative is impossible if the product cannot compete by itself... the monopoly is an unfair advantage to the product, but it doesn't MAKE the product.
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This is very true. Microsoft provides everyone with very cheap products. Of course they do have an illegal monopoly as determined by the court. And, if you studied economics, this means that their market is a cash cow for them. They can easily offer cheaper products and beat out competitors this way. IE is cheaper than netscape, same with xdocs. This is what's great about a monopoly, you reap the benefits of the monopoly by jacking up prices(this was established in court) then provide cheap if not free products/services to rid yourself of competition ie keeping a monopoly. You're exactly right. The consumer is getting a free and adequate product. At the same time, other companies are not allowed to innovate. Microsoft can innovate within the windows market, but others cannot because Microsoft controls what is / what is not bundled.
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Anyone who has studied economics knows that monopolies are not that simple to classify as evil, nor that simple to dissolve. Their effects are more confusing and subtle, particularly when it comes to prove that the consumers have been effectively harmed (which is the only thing that matters in monopoly regulation).
Monopolies are centralizations of economic power, and their respective problems and advantages are the same of a government-based centralized economy: the monopoly regulates the market, consciously or unconsciously. Of course, they have a strong motivation to do so consciously in spite of its illegality.
Microsoft's monopoly has had a number of negative effects on the industry, with material, effective damage to consumers. The difficulties of proving this damage in the DOJ case were a direct consequence of choosing Netscape as the poster boy of monopoly victimhood.
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The key is anti-competitive. Microsoft was found guilty of using its monopoly powers to displace competitors like Netscape by bundling its browser with the OS.
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What you don't seem to notice is that that is not the key. It's completely NOT the point. It's off-topic.
It's like shooting someone in the head and blaming his death on his unhealthy diet and chronic alcoholism. Yes, it may have been killing him for years, but it's the bullet that really nailed him.
"Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?". IF XDOCS IS A COMPETITION TO PDF: YES, ALL THE ONES THAT MATTER.
Why? Because not even a monopoly can sell a non-product; for MS to push an alternative, even if it's free, it has to be good enough to be worth it.
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If you were able to comprehend written English you would know that I was not referring to Z, but the qualifier "may have".. This brings into doubt Y, when in fact it's a fact that Y actually occured, so "may have" is incorrect.. if we're talking about proper use of English, of course.
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All right, let's flame away: If you were able to comprehend English properly you would know that I knew exactly what you were referring to, and that I was criticizing precisely the parsing that led you to that interpretation.
The English language includes figures of speech that cannot be directly translated to prepositional calculus. The figure " X may be, but Z is still true" is one of those expressions.
But then again, perhaps you really do mean "proper" English as in a formalized canon that supersedes the informal conventions that people have been evolving for centuries. However, although I know of authorities for proper French, Spanish, Basque and others, I am not familiar with the Academy of the English Language, perhaps you could point me to their offices?
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Have fun modding another post of yours up to 2!
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Yes, because clicking on the "No Score +1 Bonus" box on each one of my comments would make me so morally superior.
Ok, let's say some other company, let's call it "Company Z" decides to create a competitor to the PDF format. It's completely open, the software to create PDF files is free. But wait, how are they going to spread their viewing application code to users? Oh no! They can't! In theory you would like to say "This is the best product out there so people will use it." So Company Z puts it on the web but no one downloads it.. even though it's the best product! Heaven forbid!
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Let's give Z an interesting name in the experiment... hmm... yes, let's call it, Adobe. And let's call the product "PDF", the viewer "Acrobat" and force everyone who wants to read it to download the free reader from the then awfully slow Internet...
Yes, of course this business model could never work.
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So in other words, Microsoft is using its momentum in the OS market in order to provide a competing product to users. It may be nice, but what about the even better products which don't have the luxury of bundling software with the OS?
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This invites a couple of questions which are at the root the same:
I) As a consumer, WHY DO I CARE about the "poor products" ?
II) IF these products are so much better, IN WHAT SENSE?
A product is only "better" if it is a better match for the needs of the customer. If, from the point of view of the consumer the products are equivalent, the consumer doesn't care about what happens to the non-preferred product. Nor should he/she care.
Yet another example (actually, the same I've been using for other things here): the OS comes integrated with a free, fully functional HTML document viewer. Hey, it even includes scripting capabilities, or the ability to run full Java applications if I want. There's even a pletorah of free/cheap HTML authoring tools to design my documents. It's free, and it's everywhere!
Why would I, the consumer, ever look for a non-integrated, expensive solution for my documents?
Personally, I rarely do. 99% of the time, for me typical document creation (Word/Powerpoint) is functionally equivalent to HTML, and so I use HTML.
But I'm not a typical case. For the typical case, HTML is wholly inadequate for their documents, and they need MSOffice, OpenOffice, StarOffice or whatever they choose. They pay the money, install the gigabytes of software, run the bloated thing and produce... a memo.
Word could be technologically speaking more complete than any HTML authoring tool, but from my point of view it suffers of "featuritis". From the point of view of the typical Office user, HTML lacks crucial features. From the point of view of the typical publisher, BOTH technologies are completely inadequate.
The point is that "better product", functionally speaking, is mostly decided by the consumer according to their needs, and it usually means that which satisfies their minimum requrirements for the minimal price with the minimal effort.
If they can make do with Office they don't care about PDF. If they can do with HTML they don't care about Office products. If they can do with Explorer they don't care about Netscape.
Why should they? A personal hovercraft would be really nice, superior technology, but why should I have to pay 200K for one if I can happily make do with a car?
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Better product? Hmm, I seem to remember Microsoft rushing IE out the door and creating an extremely buggy product.. In fact both were equally buggy.
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You are both correct and incorrect.
Internet Explorer 1-3 was a rushed piece of crap. It was even buggier than Netscape, messy, and lacking features.
Also, it was not integrated with the OS in any way, and it was tremendously unpopular. Nobody used it.
Internet Explorer 4 came tightly integrated with the Win98 OS, quickly became very popular, and is considered in general to be Netscape's "killer".
It was also a well-featured, polished product. Much, much more stable than Netscape, in spite of being a more complicated product tightly coupled with the OS.
Since this is the one that took the market share from Netscape, and this is the one that is considered an anti-competitive case, versions 1-3 are as irrelevant to the discussion as they were to the market.
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And may have played unfairly? No, it's a fact that they did play unfairly
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You seem to be unfamiliar with certain expressions of the English language. Expressions of the form "Subject X MAY have done Y, but Z is still true" are used not to question the validity of Y, but to point out that the result Z is not affected by whether it's true or not.
You don't get it still. In order to replace PDF, it would still have to be able to compete with PDF in the eyes of the users.
.NET to compete with Java).
You want a client application that views a document format in every PC? You already have it. If you have Windows, click on that blue "e" somewhere in the desktop.
Microsoft has integrated at different points RTF, Word format, Internet Explorer (and its own brand of HTML/XHTML and ActiveX), etc. into the OS.
Most of the document producers are still using MS Office to create these documents (remember that whole monopoly thing?) and using the native format for internal consumption. That's why they need products to export these documents to PDF.
Why would they use PDF instead, imposing the burden on their users of downloading and installing Acrobat, etc? Simply because they need what PDF provides as a document format. They need it so badly that it has become a necessity.
Anything that competes with PDF would have to provide the useful features of PDF, otherwise it won't succeed. The "everyone is using it" won't work because "everyone is using already PDF too, and it actually works" will be the response.
If MS hopes that the users would accept a merely adequate product for a lower price ("gratis"), they're probably right. MS may want to sacrifice profit and give it away to get market share if they want, but they'll also have to deliver a decent product in the process.
The fact that there's already a legacy investment, that transparency and openness are currently valued features of the PDF product, means that it will be forced to "open" its alternative to compete (in the same sense, and with the same quote-unquote, that it had to do with
Is that really so bad?
Consider that PDF is useful mostly because the other document formats are useless. If Microsoft provides a decent replacement integrated with Office, I would see it as fixing an incomplete product.
On the sidenote:
Of course they played dirty, just read the conclusions of the anti-trust judge. MS hid API's from Netscape so their software wasn't as good.
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And I assume that's what stopped Opera and other companies from developing better products?
Is that why Netscape crashed even more than Internet Explorer, in spite of it being a simpler, less integrated (and therefore less interacted with) product?
Microsoft may have unfairly given advantage to its product, and there are competitors in the market which would have fared better otherwise, but Netscape sucked by its own efforts.
The OS doesn't "check" each file. That would be prohibitive. At most it could check the bytestream as it is read from the disk, and (I'm not familiar with PDF details) it might not be clearly identifiable at the beginning. In some cases it might be worth it (executables could be checked for safety, for example), but even then it has its costs in speed, and for data it's irrational... are you willing to read that 600MB swapfile into memory before deciding which type it is?!
A file is a collection of data stored in the disk. About the only "typing" the OS normally has is whether that piece of data is "executable" or not.
What you suggest is a filesystem with metadata, which is not necessarily a bad idea, but it's not very popular these days and even where it's present it can only be much more general than that, providing a slot for information that applications can use. In Windows, and for compatibility reasons now many other OSes, there is only "pseudo-typing" by extensions in the filename, but this is merely a convention to facilitate "application integration" (mapping extensions to applications) since typing is only useful for applications.
The problem with putting this at such a low level as the OS is that the OS cannot, nor should it, know all the types of data/programs there can be. It's not its job. If it were, it would seriously limit the use of the machine.
Windows cannot "summarily delete all pdf files" because it cannot distinguish them that easily from other collections of bytes. Even if they are tagged with the PDF extension, it's not certain that it means it's a PDF, and if it assumes so, that doesn't delete the files that don't follow the convention (because they came from different filesystems, or because they were named, say, pdfv2 or something like that by Adobe).
This is just a matter of subtlety. Like lobotomizing your hyperactive kid, not only will it get you in trouble, but it will be a big obstacle for your own plans for the future.
You neglected the main point of my comment: the user demographics are different. For Average Joes, PDF is a read-only format, and it's not the Average Joes that Microsoft has to convert, it's the content producers.
Perhaps you might compare this to the effect that MS Internet Explorer "extensions" had on HTML, but that would require "embracing" PDF in order to "extend" it (and provide a default viewer for the "extensions").
This is no such case.
As a side note:
As a long-time Netscape user I'd say that is correct anyway.
Netscape didn't leave my computer until Internet Explorer became a better browser. Only recently has it returned.
Yes, Microsoft played dirty. Yes, it integrated Internet Explorer with the OS awfully. Yet Netscape 4.x was so bad that I preferred Internet Explorer IN SPITE of its integration (and the "browser crashes the computer for no reason" part).
For most users, PDF is a read-only format. They don't need to publish to PDF. Usually, they can't.
For them, MSOffice-formats are already the default and nothing is going to change that. This includes most intra-office file exchange.
And yet, PDF has met a particular need to the point where it is the standard publishing format. The people publishing to it USUALLY know a bit of what they're doing and are publishing to PDF (rather than Word2K) for a reason.
For them it's not going to be "killed" unless the alternative:
I- Is at least as functional as PDF (for their needs).
II- Can interoperate with PDF (convert back-and-forth) so that they don't lose their previous work.
III- Is as "universal" as PDF (platform-wise).
IV- The transition cost is low, or nil.
This points to an "open" standard (II, III, IV) with a cheap set of commercial tools (I, IV) and direct export support on commercial applications (IV).
In other words, to be a "killer" it has to be able to compete with PDF in the first place. It has to be either better, or cheaper, and probably both.
I'm curious as to HOW this would be implemented?
Are you saying that MS will put some code in their corresponding "read_file()" function that goes like:
if ( file.name.endsWith("pdf") || file_analyzer.matches(file, PDF_FORMAT) )
play_crappy_Flash_Metallica_Animation("PDF BAAD!")
Wouldn't that be a bit too much, running this for each file read?
I mean, as far as I know MS doesn't "support" PDF any more than it supports any other file format because, well, it's a FILE FORMAT.
Like Java, people still have to download an application (Adobe Acrobat) in order to read and use the files. Unlike Java, the lack of initial "default support" means that people understand that concept, download Acrobat and that's it. Acrobat then handles whatever "support" is needed.
Printed-doc file formats? Isn't this handled by the printer driver, such as a print-to-PDF-driver?
Surely MS doesn't want to take full responsability of hardware drivers these days, even if they're just printers! Or am I misreading the term?
Completely undercutting PDF would be, as you say, analogous to completely undercutting Navigator, and almost as unfeasible. It would require specifically engineering the OS to check every file (document or executable on each case), analyze it (is it PDF, or is it Navigator?) and sabotage it.
They would need a better excuse these days than they had for DR DOS, because they would be more suspect, it would be MUCH more obvious, it would affect negatively their clients more directly, it would be technically more expensive (check every file, not the running environment) and they have the money and resources to take the market in another way.
It would be like playing that trick against Harvard Graphics or Lotus back then, a bit too high-profile...
Hmmm... care to mention any John Wayne/John Ford westerns with a frozen nude girl in a box? I think I missed those ones.
I don't think there has to be a problem with a common API for this anymore than there is for databases. Define an Adapter (driver) API and let other people code plug-ins/adapters to your system. Once there is critical mass and the corresponding demand, you'll probably want to provide an adapter yourself, or perhaps one of the external project grows up to the point of being trusted and stable.
Or are the differences in CMS implementation so radical that a driver system for communication cannot be devised?
All the images I have seen so far scream "Outlaw Star". I'd bet there's a "Galatic Layline" equivalent in the main plot...
Of course, I also thought there were eerie similarities between "Titan A.E" and "Mysterious Cities of Gold", so I might be the one seeing things.
Yes, it's visible right there. Has always been. Yet in the comments, now we have the [link.com] notation to avoid goatse links sneaking unto readers.
Why? Because we're LAZY. And because when we're reading Slashdot, we're not in our most intellectually aware (or porn-browsing paranoid) mood.
Almost flawlessly the "Free Registration required: blah blah blah" warning has been there, so at least I got used to the idea that if something similar wasn't there, I could click away.
Once more, not a matter of life-or-death. Just something NICE to do, to save a percentage of your users two clicks and an annoyance.
Yes, I'm sure Bill Gates personally has a black list in his office with the names of all Open Source advocates that have challenged his empire and every morning, at a strategic meeting with his closest advisors, he has a conversation like this:
- Bill, we have successfully increased the revenue of the company by 20%. We expect this to bring the stockholders to the level of optimism they had before the recession.
Bill: Yeah, yeah, whatever...
- Bill, our deals with the media conglomerates regarding DRM are proceeding flawlessly, ensuring that we are unopposed to push for the PC as the consumer device that coordinates everyone's information-related activities, including entertainment.
Bill: Sure. That's nice, I guess.
- Bill, our marketing campaign for Web Services is being successful among developers. Soon they will be tied to our standards and companies will have to consider Windows servers seriously for their large-scale network services.
Bill: What's wrong with you people? Is this what I pay you for?!
Silence.
Bill: Ok, who can answer the really important question? How close am I to fulfilling my personal vendetta against the Open Source Linux geeks? How many did we get fired today?
- I called HP yesterday morning. We got Bruce Perens fired.
Bill: Geek #427? EXCELLENT!
Bill takes list, draws little check mark on "#427 Bruce Perens" entry.
Bill: Ok. According to my list, "#428 Billy Tempherton" is next. He's a Linux administrator for a community college in Iowa that posted something about me being evil and Windows crashing his computer, at that Slashdot site in 1999...
- We're working on it, Sir!
Bill: Good! Meeting dismissed! I have to go to Slashdot and see who posted something against me today...
I know the "NY-Times Free Registration" horse is dead, but it would be nice to warn users that it's a NY Times link, even if it is the usual "Note: Free Registration, blah blah blah, stop pestering us we have more important duties here at Slashdot than editing content...". Or maybe even just a link[nytimes.com] notation.
Just so we don't bother.
It would be even nicer to provide an extra link if it exists. But I guess that IS asking way too much.
Well, I don't know about Microsoft, and I do know a lot of VB developers that hate VB.NET with all their guts, but I have to say I find it impressive for the same reasons they hate it: it's a language that forces OO design, uses modern libraries, and in the end it's all source code.
I'm not a big fan of VBisms such as "MustOverride", "MustInherit", "NotInheritable" etc, which can easily become unreadably verbose for my taste as you combine them, but after trying it out for a couple of simple apps as an experiment I find it an outstanding improvement over the original VB.
I think it's perfectly feasible to build a relatively big project in VB.NET without destroying some hardware and going on Prozac, as I would expect with any other VB.
Not that I would, but it has become a matter of taste or distaste for the VB-like syntax, not a major disfunctionality of the language itself.
VB.NET is a crutch. But it's a crutch that manages to fix VB as a language. I consider that an achievement, to say the least.
Heh. Depending on how "EE" is the "J2EE" server you're talking about, I might agree.
But since I'm very happy with the non-EJB part of J2EE in most app-servers/servlet-containers I have tried, I might be projecting my skepticism about EJB on the app-servers themselves and judging them on very limited experience.
On the blaming issue, copied and pasted from the original comment:
"It's not clear that MS killed Java on the client. In my opinion, Java was not ready for the client and therefore it killed itself with the Applet hype.
But that doesn't mean shooting a man dying of cancer is not a crime. "
I'm going to have to copy and paste this from my original comment to every reply to any thread on this story:
.NET initiative? I don't think so. But I think they need to implement a security model at the "language level" that satisfies the same requirements, and reached the same solution: implement the security model on a standard VM running the bytecode.
"It's not clear that MS killed Java on the client. In my opinion, Java was not ready for the client and therefore it killed itself with the Applet hype...But that doesn't mean shooting a man dying of cancer is not a crime."
Yes, Java's "write-once-compile-once-run-everywhere" was overhyped.
Yes, Java as a just-a-language has merit.
Yes, supporting Java because you hate MS or hating MS because you support Java is really, really stupid.
But I believe that Java without the JVM doesn't have as much merit as Java with the JVM, and it's not because of the cross-platform feature, that's a side-effect.
Was Java designed as a cross-platform language? My Java history may be fuzzy, but for some reason, I don't think that was a priority.
I think it was designed as a "network-oriented language", where arbitrary code could be sent back and forth through the network and run predictable in a relatively secure manner, even when data and code sources were not inherently trusted. Common bytecode and a standard VM would then be an implication of the requirement, not a requirement itself.
Does MS really believe in the need for cross-platform compatibility for their
Now for the kind of things that a client does, particularly thick clients like we are used to, a lowest-common-denominator VM is idiotic, which is why Java was not ready for the complex-UI-client and may still not be (depending on the meaning of "complex" these days).
But for programs sending and servicing requests and passing objects around through an open network, the VM is a solution, and the lowest-common-denominator is not an issue.
Because Pascal died academically during the Java hype, not during the Delphi/VB hype.
Which is rather unfortunate, because if Delphi had been adopted as an educational language at the appropiate time, it would be stronger in the market and I really like the product. Also, it would have been a much better OO-educational language, in my opinion, than C++.
If you were talking about the software development platform, you would be correct.
However, the incompatibilities were in MS JVM, which was pre-installed in Windows.
This is on the user-side, and a user is as likely to notice the source of the problem, download and install a new JVM, as he/she is likely to download and install a new set of shared libraries.
A) The article was about Java's Death On The Client. Java's vital signs on the server side have, so far, not been disputed. Many developers also consider Java a better match for the server than for the GUI-oriented client.
B) Until recently a very significant portion of programming courses currently taught in Java were taught in Pascal. Java has been more popular in academic circles than C/C++ and Pascal, being as dead in its pure form as a language can be, was bound to be replaced by some OO language.
Java is not dead, but like Pascal, it could very well be dead in the Real World and still be the teaching language in a lot of programming courses.
"MORE compliant"? Compliant with what? The "Java" specification? Was it more Java than Java?
MS Java was, and is (because it's still out there and it's still a pain) NON-COMPLIANT, which means quirky, of unpredictable behavior, not-following the standard imposed by the brand which they licensed.
If I code an Applet using standard Java and it runs on every JVM except MS, MS Java is crippled. And that's the situation that prompted Sun's conflict with MS.
Ask any Java developer out there that has had to deploy Java Applets on the Internet, where you cannot force your users to download a standard (or non-standard) JRE unless you're willing to lose demographics. They have to target their Applets to either standard JVMs or MS JVMs, or spent code and debugging time testing both as if they were different platforms... because they are.
If your JVM cannot run my standard Java code unless I target it specifically, the JVM is crippled. If the code I target specifically on your JVM doesn't run exactly alike in other standard JVMs, your JVM is crippled (it requires non-portable non-cross-platform code).
Now, MS Java may have been faster (certain parts were), and may have been a nice language/VM set by itself. But it was not portable, not cross-platform, and it was not compliant with the Java specs. Which means it broke Java applications and MS legal obligations according to the license.
I suspect his point was precisely to play the karma whore by duplicating the article, only he/she didn't expect to be as successful.
At least that's my impression from the Subject.
The typical argument for "MS Killed Java" is not that Java died because it was not included in Windows, but rather because it was included in a crippled way that misrepresented the language.
It would be the equivalent of Microsoft giving away a Linux distribution "MS Linux" that crashes often, doesn't run most of the GNU programs (gcc included), has a different set of C libraries with their own quirks, and uses a really old version of Gnome as a fixed, non-configurable GUI.
Then everyone would say "I tried Linux, it came with Windows, but it sucks" and it would take a lengthy, unwanted explanation to let them know that their "free Linux" was crippled. Even then most will never try it again.
It's not clear that MS killed Java on the client. In my opinion, Java was not ready for the client and therefore it killed itself with the Applet hype.
But that doesn't mean shooting a man dying of cancer is not a crime.
I think that you may have missed the connection between the different sets of diagrams in UML.
The use-cases don't stand by themselves. They just happen to be arguably the most high-level view of the application, and the closest to the process of answering the "what does the client want?" question.
The connection between the Class Diagrams and the Use Cases, from my point of view, is formed by the Sequence Diagrams. Each Sequence Diagram solves a Use Case through communications between entities from the Class Diagram.
The Sequence Diagrams translate quite directly to source code, and connects the source code to the Use Cases and therefore to the client's requirements.
Of course, that's assuming an ideal world where the requirements were correctly collected through the magic of Use Cases in the first place. More likely, by the time you get to Sequence Diagrams something is clearly terribly wrong and you have to correct the Use Cases and recollect requirements, etc.
The value of the Use Cases is not so much, I think, "making clear the requirements", but having a structured way of getting those requirements linked to the source code when you finally get them right.
I may be a bit confused here:
.NET?
What exactly is it that you cannot do with your source code in Visual Studio
I don't mean that the wisdom of MS has allowed them to put all functionality ever needed in Visual Studio.
I mean that every time I checked my source code was still there in a flat file, and I could modify it with a text editor, a perl script, or whatever I wanted.
I haven't seen any repository system from which I have to import/export source code or anything like that. Am I missing something?