Yes, that's because RTF is mostly text layout, rather than using any binary p-codes or compression. I imagine this was done to make it easier to support as a transport mechanism.
I can see it as a potential replacement for non-power users, but only if your entire business is composed of similar users. Like say maybe for a health club with 2-3 computers used by internal staffs.
But for a large deployment of say 800(as Roblimo suggests), it's doubtful.
I also suspect if Microsoft started seeing substantial market loss, they would modify their pricing. This would be a good thing, but I'm sure that the/. drones would complain endlessly about it.
"The cost of switching didn't save WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, and it isn't going to save Microsoft Office either."
No, you're right. It didn't.
But that's because Microsoft offered something that was a substantially better product over what Lotus and Wordperfect offered. This better product could be shown to have substantial productivity gains, which gave it a very high ROI.
The point of my article was the $100-200 you save cannot be equated into ROI, not just because of the cost of switching, but also because StarOffice has tremendously less functionality which works into a negative ROI in the long run as compared to the Office choice. The point being, StarOffice can't just be cheaper, it has to be better.
Wow, it sounds like you have more serious issues than just your choice of desktop operating systems.
You've got a real hodge podge of solutions there, and it appears you have quickly discovered why going with cheap doesn't serve a purpose long term. Good luck to you. I was also making the same mistakes when I was 23.
Win-OS/2 was what made OS/2 both a success and a failure. By supporting Windows, they made the transition to OS/2 very easy. But by supporting Windows, they made the transition away from OS/2 also very easy, because nobody developed software just for OS/2.
Regardless, I do not see how you can accuse Microsoft of being unfair to IBM by not giving them their software. Would IBM have given up licensing to oh say MVS so that Microsoft could build a compatibility module for Windows NT? Very doubtful.
What I find most intriguing about your argument, and others like it on/. is that you refuse to acknowledge that people are thinking about these issues and have serious questions. No, in your last paragraph you say "Look! You are not allowed to think about this or question it. I want this thing to happen, and I'm going to ram it down your fucking throat."
Your memory is really bad. Navigator has been free since pretty much day one. Yes, Netscape did toy with the idea of getting licensing revenue from corporate sales, but it was always available for free off the website, and they never hounded individual consumers. Especially in the early days when most people were running beta's, since the production versions didn't work right.
I have some quotes from Andreessen where he explains right from the start that they will be offering the browser for free, because the money is in the server software.
Before you go questioning Microsoft's memory, you better refresh your own.
Roblimo mentions something about creating and editing pdf files, and appears to implie this is included in Word and Wordperfect. To my knowledge it is not, it requires the purchase of a $200 piece of software from Adobe.
Roblimo then goes off apparently comparing the price of retail editions of Office to Staroffice. Keep in mind, most companies already have Office from Microsoft, so they'd be paying upgrade prices. There are also various discounts available, especially on the Select license agreements, OEM bundles, etc. XP Standard is more like $200 and XP Professional around $300.
But then he makes a claim that this substantial savings($100-200 per desktop) would prove you were "a company that respects its stockholders (or a government agency that respects taxpayers)". But what justification does he give for this? I don't see it.
$100-200 per machine is really quite a small amount of money in the big picture. If I have staff that already knows how to use MS Office, sending them to a $500 training course to learn how to use Staroffice negates any cost savings from software licensing. Even if only half my staff needs training, that's still substantial. Then what about productivity gains? Will I be able to do the same work in Staroffice as MSOffice in the same amount of time? Will it take more time, less time, etc?
If I give a project to someone and it takes them an extra day to complete because they used Staroffice, once again we've completely lost the $100 cost savings.
Those are factors that come into play when making corporate buying decisions, and it is something that Roblimo clearly doesn't grasp or understand. The review he gives of StarOffice does not go into near enough detail to prove that it is a viable product.
"anything instead of MS.doc format (which changes with every bloody office release anyway). "
Actually the.doc format has now gone through three releases(97, 2000, XP) without any substantial format changes. Yes, the newer versions do support new features, but the format itself is backwards compatible such that I can create a document in XP and load it in Word 97.
It depends on what you are looking for, if you just want to be able to read a document... no problem... the substance is there. If you want to colloborate on the creation, well then you have to limit yourself on features and not worry too much about complex layout, etc.
As far as RTF... That is a Microsoft standard, but a good one for interoperability because it's reasonably well documented. I don't understand your comment about bloat. Do you want support for word processing, or are you just looking for a fancy text file?
As solid of a product as Office XP has turned out to be, Sun has an uphill battle with regards to StarOffice. I also think XP will probably be the last release of Office that Microsoft is able to sell because it has hit maturity and does just about anything and everything one could want.
Dual monitor support works very well under WinXP. I have a Radeon VE Dual Display edition with two NEC LCD1530V 15" flat panel monitors, and absolutely love it.
While I can certainly appreciate your issues, because they are similar to ones I have faced in the past. I am not at all convinced that your solution is the best one because you have so many caveats.
I would recommend making a list of all features you feel you must have. Then create another list of all solutions to those issues. Take the various permutations and rate them on the ability to perform the jobs.
From what you describe, it really strikes me that an all Windows solution would be best, if your goal is to reduce administration issues.
Unfortunately the other side of Vendor lies is anti-Vendor lies.
For instance, this quote: "Did you realize 486's are still useable machines if you're running something other than Microsoft's latest software? For instance, Linux worked great on 486's back when they were the top of the line and amazingly enough it didn't stop working on them once the Pentiums came out. "
You know what? The same is also true of Windows 3.1. The release of Windows XP didn't suddenly make Windows 3.1 stop working.
This is a myth which was started by R.E. Ballard in the comp.os.linux.advocacy group back in around 1995. It's not been corroborated by anybody else, and Mr. Ballard refuses to provide any evidence to substantiate it, although he did once claim that it was so important to SCO that they reported it as an Asset in their annual reports.
Given Mr. Ballard's propensity for exagerration and lying, I really would not lend any credence to this story. It may very well be true, but if it is, the consequences of it would surely not be nearly as far reaching as Mr. Ballard's claim.
"Things cost a bit more, but they appear to be working better and for longer than the stash I bought when I lived in the States."
No, he said it would cost more than $5 in Europe, but would work better.
My point was that in the US I have options. I can choose to spend little for disposable items, or I can spend more for durable items. In Europe I'd be screwed and would not be able to afford the luxury of a blender.
I don't think Joel would disagree with you, because you have presented a clear economic reason for why not rewriting is bad(i.e. competitive advantage). The difficulty is quantifying that into real numbers and will it solve your problem.
Joel has certainly addressed the issue of competitive advantage, and I believe he used the example of Netscape. With Netscape 6, they choose to rewrite from the ground up. In the mean time they left the marketplace for 4 years while the competitors came out with continual improvements to their own products. Can you afford to leave the market place for 2-3 years while you rewrite your product from the ground up? Or is it better to spend 6-12 months refactoring?
It all depends.
As far as the mindshare to lure/train IT staff, yes there is an economic cost to this, but it's hard to quantify. I think Kaplan/Norton try to approach this in their Balanced Scorecard book from Harvard Press. The point being, studying those arguments, if they are solid you ought to be able to quantify this out into a ROI model to prove the value of a rewrite.
The redesign doesn't need to be done to fit the Microsoft OS, it needs to be done to manage the devices.
Right now BIOS settings, and the POST bootup stuff only go to the video device. That needs to be modified to redirect to a serial console. Right now to do this, you need to use a add-on board such as Compaq's Remote Insight.
This new hardware design spec would also benefit x86 Unices.
"2.1 was the ultimate in stability and performance for OS/2. "
That's not true at all. I worked for a Fortune 500 company at one time with OS/2 deployed everywhere. We had much more success both in terms of performance and stability when upgrading client desktops to OS/2 3.0.
And these were "official" IBM machines. Lot's of Model 77's, PC-750, etc. All of these machines came shipped pre-installed with OS/2, so I don't understand this other point of yours.
You are correct on the Win95 thing, as well as native application support. OS/2 had it's day in the sun, failed to take advantage of that and ultimately lost.
Slashdot Mirror
"It is FULL of features (and the bugs to go with them) that most people will never need. "
With this one statement you proved you were ignorant. You could have saved a lot of time typing.
Yes, that's because RTF is mostly text layout, rather than using any binary p-codes or compression. I imagine this was done to make it easier to support as a transport mechanism.
I can see it as a potential replacement for non-power users, but only if your entire business is composed of similar users. Like say maybe for a health club with 2-3 computers used by internal staffs.
/. drones would complain endlessly about it.
But for a large deployment of say 800(as Roblimo suggests), it's doubtful.
I also suspect if Microsoft started seeing substantial market loss, they would modify their pricing. This would be a good thing, but I'm sure that the
"The cost of switching didn't save WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, and it isn't going to save Microsoft Office either."
No, you're right. It didn't.
But that's because Microsoft offered something that was a substantially better product over what Lotus and Wordperfect offered. This better product could be shown to have substantial productivity gains, which gave it a very high ROI.
The point of my article was the $100-200 you save cannot be equated into ROI, not just because of the cost of switching, but also because StarOffice has tremendously less functionality which works into a negative ROI in the long run as compared to the Office choice. The point being, StarOffice can't just be cheaper, it has to be better.
Wow, it sounds like you have more serious issues than just your choice of desktop operating systems.
You've got a real hodge podge of solutions there, and it appears you have quickly discovered why going with cheap doesn't serve a purpose long term. Good luck to you. I was also making the same mistakes when I was 23.
Win-OS/2 was what made OS/2 both a success and a failure. By supporting Windows, they made the transition to OS/2 very easy. But by supporting Windows, they made the transition away from OS/2 also very easy, because nobody developed software just for OS/2.
/. is that you refuse to acknowledge that people are thinking about these issues and have serious questions. No, in your last paragraph you say "Look! You are not allowed to think about this or question it. I want this thing to happen, and I'm going to ram it down your fucking throat."
Regardless, I do not see how you can accuse Microsoft of being unfair to IBM by not giving them their software. Would IBM have given up licensing to oh say MVS so that Microsoft could build a compatibility module for Windows NT? Very doubtful.
What I find most intriguing about your argument, and others like it on
Your memory is really bad. Navigator has been free since pretty much day one. Yes, Netscape did toy with the idea of getting licensing revenue from corporate sales, but it was always available for free off the website, and they never hounded individual consumers. Especially in the early days when most people were running beta's, since the production versions didn't work right.
I have some quotes from Andreessen where he explains right from the start that they will be offering the browser for free, because the money is in the server software.
Before you go questioning Microsoft's memory, you better refresh your own.
I agree that I would have liked to see documentation of file formats as part of the settlement in addition to the APIs.
But doing that would require Microsoft's competitors to have to do work, so you can see why they didn't propose this to the dissenting states.
Roblimo mentions something about creating and editing pdf files, and appears to implie this is included in Word and Wordperfect. To my knowledge it is not, it requires the purchase of a $200 piece of software from Adobe.
Roblimo then goes off apparently comparing the price of retail editions of Office to Staroffice. Keep in mind, most companies already have Office from Microsoft, so they'd be paying upgrade prices. There are also various discounts available, especially on the Select license agreements, OEM bundles, etc. XP Standard is more like $200 and XP Professional around $300.
But then he makes a claim that this substantial savings($100-200 per desktop) would prove you were "a company that respects its stockholders (or a government agency that respects taxpayers)". But what justification does he give for this? I don't see it.
$100-200 per machine is really quite a small amount of money in the big picture. If I have staff that already knows how to use MS Office, sending them to a $500 training course to learn how to use Staroffice negates any cost savings from software licensing. Even if only half my staff needs training, that's still substantial. Then what about productivity gains? Will I be able to do the same work in Staroffice as MSOffice in the same amount of time? Will it take more time, less time, etc?
If I give a project to someone and it takes them an extra day to complete because they used Staroffice, once again we've completely lost the $100 cost savings.
Those are factors that come into play when making corporate buying decisions, and it is something that Roblimo clearly doesn't grasp or understand. The review he gives of StarOffice does not go into near enough detail to prove that it is a viable product.
"anything instead of MS .doc format (which changes with every bloody office release anyway). "
.doc format has now gone through three releases(97, 2000, XP) without any substantial format changes. Yes, the newer versions do support new features, but the format itself is backwards compatible such that I can create a document in XP and load it in Word 97.
Actually the
It depends on what you are looking for, if you just want to be able to read a document... no problem... the substance is there. If you want to colloborate on the creation, well then you have to limit yourself on features and not worry too much about complex layout, etc.
As far as RTF... That is a Microsoft standard, but a good one for interoperability because it's reasonably well documented. I don't understand your comment about bloat. Do you want support for word processing, or are you just looking for a fancy text file?
As solid of a product as Office XP has turned out to be, Sun has an uphill battle with regards to StarOffice. I also think XP will probably be the last release of Office that Microsoft is able to sell because it has hit maturity and does just about anything and everything one could want.
But he indicated that the software they need to run doesn't all work on OSX.
Dual monitor support works very well under WinXP. I have a Radeon VE Dual Display edition with two NEC LCD1530V 15" flat panel monitors, and absolutely love it.
While I can certainly appreciate your issues, because they are similar to ones I have faced in the past. I am not at all convinced that your solution is the best one because you have so many caveats.
I would recommend making a list of all features you feel you must have. Then create another list of all solutions to those issues. Take the various permutations and rate them on the ability to perform the jobs.
From what you describe, it really strikes me that an all Windows solution would be best, if your goal is to reduce administration issues.
Unfortunately the other side of Vendor lies is anti-Vendor lies.
For instance, this quote:
"Did you realize 486's are still useable machines if you're running something other than Microsoft's latest software? For instance, Linux worked great on 486's back when they were the top of the line and amazingly enough it didn't stop working on them once the Pentiums came out. "
You know what? The same is also true of Windows 3.1. The release of Windows XP didn't suddenly make Windows 3.1 stop working.
BeOS, OS/2, etc only add further proof to the claim that the best product always wins in the marketplace.
6 30 .html
The problem with your 4th grade education is that you have to understand that the definition of "Best" is not defined by you, but rather by consumers.
As far as Tucker... That story is frequently exagerrated. Here's part of the story from someone who worked for Tucker:
http://www.dispatch.com/wheels/autonews/tucker0
This is a myth which was started by R.E. Ballard in the comp.os.linux.advocacy group back in around 1995. It's not been corroborated by anybody else, and Mr. Ballard refuses to provide any evidence to substantiate it, although he did once claim that it was so important to SCO that they reported it as an Asset in their annual reports.
Given Mr. Ballard's propensity for exagerration and lying, I really would not lend any credence to this story. It may very well be true, but if it is, the consequences of it would surely not be nearly as far reaching as Mr. Ballard's claim.
AOL is gonna be really angry if Time Warner switches to using Hotmail.com. :-)
I'm curious why they do not support other systems besides the Macintosh with the iPod.
:)
Perhaps Microsoft should sue Apple over this issue.
"Things cost a bit more, but they appear to be working better and for longer than the stash I bought when I lived in the States."
No, he said it would cost more than $5 in Europe, but would work better.
My point was that in the US I have options. I can choose to spend little for disposable items, or I can spend more for durable items. In Europe I'd be screwed and would not be able to afford the luxury of a blender.
Whatever. It wouldn't be a very workable solution unless the hardware was designed to work with it.
I run my SS10 headless, and can't imagine trying to manage it without some way of configuring the bootup settings.
Oh christ. Can't you people bother to educate yourself and realize that Outlook XP doesn't approach things this way.
They've already fixed the design issues by refactoring, it's time to get past that and start thinking about new things to whine about.
I don't think Joel would disagree with you, because you have presented a clear economic reason for why not rewriting is bad(i.e. competitive advantage). The difficulty is quantifying that into real numbers and will it solve your problem.
Joel has certainly addressed the issue of competitive advantage, and I believe he used the example of Netscape. With Netscape 6, they choose to rewrite from the ground up. In the mean time they left the marketplace for 4 years while the competitors came out with continual improvements to their own products. Can you afford to leave the market place for 2-3 years while you rewrite your product from the ground up? Or is it better to spend 6-12 months refactoring?
It all depends.
As far as the mindshare to lure/train IT staff, yes there is an economic cost to this, but it's hard to quantify. I think Kaplan/Norton try to approach this in their Balanced Scorecard book from Harvard Press. The point being, studying those arguments, if they are solid you ought to be able to quantify this out into a ROI model to prove the value of a rewrite.
If I'm reading these slashdot posts correctly, they are saying "Yeah, ok so Microsoft broke the rules about being a monopoly. But that's ok!"
It's kind of funny how two-faced the slashdot anti-MS contingent is.
The redesign doesn't need to be done to fit the Microsoft OS, it needs to be done to manage the devices.
Right now BIOS settings, and the POST bootup stuff only go to the video device. That needs to be modified to redirect to a serial console. Right now to do this, you need to use a add-on board such as Compaq's Remote Insight.
This new hardware design spec would also benefit x86 Unices.
I'm curious, but why exactly do you feel you have to stoop to lies to try to make a point?
"2.1 was the ultimate in stability and performance for OS/2. "
That's not true at all. I worked for a Fortune 500 company at one time with OS/2 deployed everywhere. We had much more success both in terms of performance and stability when upgrading client desktops to OS/2 3.0.
And these were "official" IBM machines. Lot's of Model 77's, PC-750, etc. All of these machines came shipped pre-installed with OS/2, so I don't understand this other point of yours.
You are correct on the Win95 thing, as well as native application support. OS/2 had it's day in the sun, failed to take advantage of that and ultimately lost.