I won't address you point by point because I don't have the time. You raise very valid issues, many of which don't however, contradict what I said. For instance, whether Windows 3 was poorly documented or deliberately obfuscated doesn't really matter to the people who didn't have access to all those useful internal functions that were clearly not intended to be exposed (i.e., because they had silly names).
In the case of Word Perfect, they failed to make the transition to Windows in time to maintain their dominance even though when they finally got their act together, their product was clearly superior, at least according to _every_ expert I've ever talked to. Nonetheless, it's debatable whether they failed to move to Windows in a timely manner because they simply didn't do a good enough job, or didn't have access to all the information that Microsoft had. Either way, the better product loses, but in one case, it's clearly because of an unfair advantage on Microsoft's part. In the other case, it was legitimate competition.
Novell lost because Microsoft, after many years, simply got better. There are plenty of cases where Microsoft was superior, at least for a time, and this was one of them. I'd say the same for Netscape about 10-15 years. IE was simply better at the time. However, while IE did nothing interesting for many years, and it was clear MS had no intention of improving it, even though it sorely needed it, it wasn't until real competition forced their hand. The fact that IE is only 3 years behind Firefox is quality, functionality and usefulness, instead of 10 years, is a testament to real competition, when it can happen. Unfortunately, there was no company to acquire and eliminate. No OEMs that could be strongarmed. No standards that could be embraced, extended and exterminated. Microsoft is clearly losing due to real competition (yet they still have more than 4/5 of the market share). But this is the exception rather than the rule.
I find Word to be the most abyssmal commercial application I have ever used. It is wholly inappropriate for 95% of what it's used for. It is poorly designed, confusing, unnecessarily complicated and obscenely buggy (at least on the Mac for the latter). There is no way it could compete on a level playing field. Excel on the other hand is a truly good product which I happily use with no frustration. However, both are the de facto standard for 95% of the world, and it's practically impossible to avoid them. Just try reading the.DOCX format without access to Office.
With the case of OEMs, however, they were intimidated from offering alternate bundles because Microsoft would simply retaliate and damage them economically for even offering the opportunity for competitors to include their products. That was pure bullying and could not happen in a truly competitive market. Some OEMs may have cut exclusive deals with MS, but others were simply forced. This was always my primary grievance with Microsoft and should have been the central issue of the anti-trust suits, not the silly bundling thing, which I always thought was perfectly reasonable. No one complains when MS bundles WordPad, even though it's a perfectly nice, if stripped down piece of software. Frankly, I'd choose WordPad over Word any day of the week.
So, yes, sometimes Microsoft has had superior products, although it's arguable whether anything of theirs today is the best in its field (I'd nominate Excel as a possibility, but I haven't used any competing products). I personally loved using Visual Studio 6 for many, many years, and I always liked XP. However, in the case of Vista, having had experience with every non-server OS from Microsoft going back to DOS 1, except Windows ME and NT 3,1, I have never found the transition to be as annoying and hassle-ridden as moving from XP to Vista, and Vista offers no feature that XP doesn't have that I find compelling or even interesting. And after spending a couple months using Vista shipped on a nice HP Pavilion
Oops! In my last message wanted to give you props for your cool Kraftwerk reference! Mine's a cool music reference too, but I don't expect too many people to get it.
Perhaps, but IE's broken standard is something everyone has to work towards and test against. It's certainly better than it used to be, but it is a perfect example, if not of e/e/e, then of people being forced to jump through hoops to support a clearly inferior product that cannot compete on functionality and stability.
It's like to 2004 election where the editor of Newsweek suggested that media bias automatically gave Kerry a 15% boost at the polls. Not to get too far into political analysis (and the minefields surrounding it), but Bush barely scraped by over a candidate that was totally uncharismatic, uninspiring and too far politically afield (left field) for the populace.
Of course, Bush is no Firefox (much more like IE), and you may disagree with the premise of my rather tenuous analogy, but IE starts with about a 95% popularity by default because it's on almost everyone's computer, and the clearly superior Firefox has been scraping by with a small percentage of users for years even though it blows IE out of the water in every measurable way.
On the other hand, the tide is turning and Firefox is increasing slowly but steadily. However, web developers still have to contend with the nightmare that is IE6 if they don't want to risk losing eyeballs because their sites simply don't work.
So this is more like embrace/extend/fail, but the fact that IE survived as long as it did in the truly horrible state that it was in, one that Microsoft clearly was happy with because they didn't even consider improvements until Firefox reminded them that they have almost never truly innovated*, merely copied, acquired or pretended "obsolete and broken" was the same as "innovative".
*Actually Microsoft Research innovates all the time, but their stuff never seems to make it into actual products.
So wait, you're telling me that despite the fact that NASA is so talented they can retroactively program a space probe from hundreds of millions of miles away to swing by Uranus and Neptune when they weren't even on the original itinerary _and_ take better pictures than originally possible when it got there, and despite the fact that they could land a space probe so gently on an asteroid that it wasn't damaged, that they would have to send a team of men up there, something which probably isn't even technologically feasible for the next 20 years, compared to figuring out some orbital mechanics (albeit with a significantly larger payload) that they've been doing successfully for decades?
I could hardly be more incredulous if you suggested stretching a giant net between satellites at opposite LaGrange points to simply bounce the thing away when it got too close.
The difference is that I don't owe Microsoft anything. They are trying to win back _my_ favor and _my_ custom. I don't care what they think of me. They should care, however, about what I think of them, because I'm one of their customers that they have lost.
Microsoft has everything to win and I have nothing to lose in this relationship. I'm very happy using open software and frankly I can't imagine a scenario where Microsoft could win back my trust, even one involving a public firing and condemnation of Ballmer and everything he stands for (although that would be a good start). I also can't imagine Microsoft making a product I would want or prefer to what I have now. They haven't done anything in many years that isn't completely unsuitable to my needs. I liked XP. Heck I _still_ like XP. But they killed XP and replaced it with something that I do not like and refuse to use. I don't owe them anything, but if they want my future business, they owe me a lot.
You don't seem to understand how the vendor/customer thing works.
Really? Then you would be familiar with the fact that it was impossible to compete with Office without access to all the undocumented functionality in Windows 3. It was impossible to create an alternative software development kit with things like a debugger without access to all the undocumented functionality in Windows 3. By that point it was pretty much too late. The damage had been done and was permanent many years before antitrust lawsuits were in a gleam in the eye of people like Eliot Spitzer and the U.S. DOJ.
Microsoft strongarmed OEMs, preventing them from bundling many competitors' software packages with Windows. Ask Be, for instance. Microsoft's file formats have largely over history been partially or poorly documented, and even today, the standard for the formats runs to hundreds of pages and is about as comprehensible as the U.S. Tax Code (and given the fact that OOo sometimes handles broken Word files better than Word itself is an example that shows this is not all due to competence on Microsoft's part).
Microsoft has practiced "embrace, extend and extinguish" where they adopted standards, altered them in some non-standard, or simply buggy, way, breaking compatibility and crippling their competition... something that would not be possible if they weren't already a de facto monopoly.
Microsoft for many years constantly broke backwards compatibility in products like Office, deliberately forcing people towards updates they neither wanted nor needed. More recently, by prematurely killing Windows XP, even though it was still in great demand (I personally bought a copy in the last year after buying a new laptop for my wife that was _literally_ unusable with Vista, with which it came bundled) again they are forcing the market to adopt Vista, even though it is wholly inappropriate for much of the hardware (and software for that matter) out there. They tacitly admitted this by allowing a reprieve to XP's untimely demise, but only for certain low-end machines that would never be capable of running Vista. However, customers won't have a choice to stay with XP, even though it is perfectly adequately and superior to Vista in almost every measurable way.
As a Windows developer for more than 15 years, I'm guessing I'm just a little more familiar with Microsoft than you, if that one meager example is all you come up with. What you said wasn't even accurate: It was Windows 3 that was artificially rendered incompatible with DR-DOS (4DOS was a shell, not a full-blown OS). Windows 95 did not use a separate DOS, so it wouldn't make sense to consider using it with something like DR-DOS. If DOS was properly documented, there's no _good_ reason why an alternative OS couldn't run Windows. It was well known in the days of OS/2 Warp that it ran Windows programs faster and better than Windows itself, so competition was theoretically possible, except Microsoft made darned sure it never happened on a level playing field. I used OS/2 myself for a while, although I finally gave up with alternatives and even Windows 95 itself, after suffering with it for a few months, and switched to NT 3.51, which was rock-solid at the time, and continued to be quite stable, at least through XP.
Microsoft was essentially handed a monopoly by IBM, and once they had it, they did everything within their power, legal or not, to hang on to it, and today, but for their monopoly, they would have been defeated in the market years ago. That is literally the only advantage they have these days, and it is obvious by their actions and the quality of their recent products, that they know it. Microsoft will have to change radically if they are going to do anything but slowly decline, and frankly, despite the tremendous assets of talent and treasure they have at their disposal, their irrationally self-destructive and frankly evil upper management is likely incapable of understanding what it will take for Micro
I always thought bundling the browser wasn't even an issue. It was all really Netscape crying like a little baby because they couldn't compete. Back in those days, IE was truly superior, especially when Netscape 4 came out. I remember installing it for the first time and watching it literally take 5 minutes "updating the registry". The thing was a huge bloated mess. Of course, MS hadn't done anything in the way of usability on the thing until Firefox reminded them what innovation was all about. Today IE is losing market share because the alternative is truly superior.
On the other hand, my wife got e-mailed a couple of attachments the other day. On was a.DOC file, and the other was.DOCX. What the hell is.DOCX? Why, it's a new XML format that only Office 2007 can open, of course. Microsoft is still up to their old ham-fisted tactics. I had to find some on-line conversion service to turn.DOCX into something readable because I don't have Office 2007 and you couldn't pay me to use Word (my wife has a student edition of Office 2003). It turns out it was just a simple letter. Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks for yet another in a long series of kicks to the groin, and more of my time wasted simply to serve the ego of that simian running your company.
I guess I don't see the need to respond to Microsoft's FUD with FUD of our own. After all, if it's wrong for them to do it, is it not also wrong for us?
It would be. But the term "FUD" implies deceit. FUD against Microsoft is much more likely to simply be true. They _are_ a monopoly. They _do_ use unfair practices to "compete". They _will_ stoop to almost any low to avoid a level playing field. This isn't FUD in the normal sense of the word. It's fact.
Users will avoid or completely abandon software that is difficult to learn.
So how do you explain Word, then? Oh, right, most people who use it have no other choice or don't realize there's another choice.
OOo Write is a lot better, but I've come to the conclusion that word processing is simply completely broken period. I think markup, like ReStructured text for most things and LaTeX if you're typesetting a calculus book or something is by far the most efficient way to go.
Microsoft doesn't compete fairly. Microsoft has never competed fairly. I'm not even sure Microsoft _could_ have ever competed fairly. I'm sure there's little difference between MS employees and Google employees except at the top. Then there's a big difference. Google's no corporate saint, but they also don't have a 30-year history of deceit, intimidation and downright theft. Microsoft has no interest in providing good products. They have no interest in allowing customers the option of choosing another vendor, but hoping they will choose Microsoft because it is truly better.
Microsoft simply does not Play Fair. They never have.
Any sane person would view any venture by Microsoft only in terms of deepest suspicion. Perhaps they have turned a corner. Frankly, I can't imagine that ever happening until they lose the hormonally-imbalanced bald guy, but maybe this is something done as much to be a good corporate citizen and advance the state of the art, instead of merely leverage their monopoly and trying their best to ruin everything that is not theirs. Nevertheless, they will rightfully need years to regain the trust of the industry.
I don't expect Microsoft to turn into a charity, or the EFF. They have every right to continue trying to be #1 and making money, at least if they do it legally. However, there are ways of succeeding that do not entail a slash-and-burn attitude towards the rest of the industry or treating your customers with nothing but contempt.
And as far as being an employee of Microsoft, by doing so you are giving implicit consent to their business practices. I could never do that, but if you who are employees can, then more power to you. It is certainly a lucrative job, and from I hear the bennies are great. The Microsoft employees (or ex-employees) that I have met have definitely been top-notch folks. But I feel people with that kind of talent and experience could do much more good working somewhere else. Still, a guy's gotta eat, you know. I used to work for AOL, so maybe I shouldn't talk...
Basically every data format Microsoft uses has some way to embed executable code or scripts. I guess it seemed like a great idea to them in the early 90's, and we live with the pain from that decision every day.
But wouldn't a patent apply to one specific method for making that kind of chair, which is not, presumably using a 3D printer?
Of course, since the patent office rubber stamps anything you stick under their noses, I'm surprised no one has patented, say, a spoon with a screwdriver on the other end, or measuring time in hundredths of hours or any other trivial thing you could come up with.
Well, I would give a big "Whoops!" there. The gun issue is ludicrous and the politicians opposed to gun rights are largely idiots, but then again the politicians who support gun rights are largely idiots too, just for different reasons. The "public debate" on these kinds of issues is embarrassingly dumb, and it's funny how the idea of merely owning a firearm being somehow evil didn't even occur until society had deteriorated to the point where large segments of the population are amoral walking ids.
However, I really have a hard time however understanding how someone who is against the objectification and degradation of women as being "twisted and evil"... I'm not talking pin-ups here. That is just the kind of upside-down twisted morality that is leading this society down a toilet. There is a fine, and perhaps completely artificial, line between "acceptable porn" that too many people seem to think is perfectly benign and things like kiddie-porn that most people seem to think is actually bad. I mean, does it really make any concrete difference whether the woman being exploited is 18 or 17? It's funny how the definition of what's "acceptable" is constantly being moved from year to year as people seek to justify their ever-increasing vices.
But please, continue to rationalize. It's fun to watch.
Regardless of the effectiveness of their tactics, I don't think the crusaders against child porn represent a "lunatic fringe". In fact, crusaders against porn in general don't represent a "lunatic fringe" either if you took the time to meet someone outside your little high school clique.
We've been coming full circle since forms were originally incorporated into HTML. Basically, the Web for the last 20 years, has more or less been reimplementing X Windows from scratch.
To be fair, I found "Life of Brian" to be mediocre at best despite a few mythically memorable line, although Monty Python in general is still de rigueur for geeks, and the 16-disc "Flying Circus" set can be had for less than $80 now, which is a good education for those poor saps that weren't even born when it was breaking ground and giving American teenagers an excuse to see intelligent, literate humor, goofy but brilliant slapstick and occasional boobies on late at night on public TV for decades.
I've noticed that a slight majority of people on the road are idiots and shouldn't have been given licenses, period. There does seem to be a correlation between driving an SUV and being an idiot, but there are idiots in all makes of cars.
Well, I must be lucky then, because I haven't had more problems compared to 7.10. Or maybe I'm more tolerant of them because I like to tinker so much. Nevertheless, I've gotten to the point where I totally prefer using Ubuntu to XP.
See? This is what's wrong with Open Source... it's run by a bunch of arrogant know-it-alls who hold users in contempt and have no interest in providing them with something that works and is useful. That's why I stick with proprietary, commerical software: because I'm a paying customer I'll be treated with respect!
Hey, you never know when you might become Ed Harris with a blue hand trying to disarm a nuclear warhead on the sea floor. An iPhone would be really helpful!
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I won't address you point by point because I don't have the time. You raise very valid issues, many of which don't however, contradict what I said. For instance, whether Windows 3 was poorly documented or deliberately obfuscated doesn't really matter to the people who didn't have access to all those useful internal functions that were clearly not intended to be exposed (i.e., because they had silly names).
In the case of Word Perfect, they failed to make the transition to Windows in time to maintain their dominance even though when they finally got their act together, their product was clearly superior, at least according to _every_ expert I've ever talked to. Nonetheless, it's debatable whether they failed to move to Windows in a timely manner because they simply didn't do a good enough job, or didn't have access to all the information that Microsoft had. Either way, the better product loses, but in one case, it's clearly because of an unfair advantage on Microsoft's part. In the other case, it was legitimate competition.
Novell lost because Microsoft, after many years, simply got better. There are plenty of cases where Microsoft was superior, at least for a time, and this was one of them. I'd say the same for Netscape about 10-15 years. IE was simply better at the time. However, while IE did nothing interesting for many years, and it was clear MS had no intention of improving it, even though it sorely needed it, it wasn't until real competition forced their hand. The fact that IE is only 3 years behind Firefox is quality, functionality and usefulness, instead of 10 years, is a testament to real competition, when it can happen. Unfortunately, there was no company to acquire and eliminate. No OEMs that could be strongarmed. No standards that could be embraced, extended and exterminated. Microsoft is clearly losing due to real competition (yet they still have more than 4/5 of the market share). But this is the exception rather than the rule.
I find Word to be the most abyssmal commercial application I have ever used. It is wholly inappropriate for 95% of what it's used for. It is poorly designed, confusing, unnecessarily complicated and obscenely buggy (at least on the Mac for the latter). There is no way it could compete on a level playing field. Excel on the other hand is a truly good product which I happily use with no frustration. However, both are the de facto standard for 95% of the world, and it's practically impossible to avoid them. Just try reading the .DOCX format without access to Office.
With the case of OEMs, however, they were intimidated from offering alternate bundles because Microsoft would simply retaliate and damage them economically for even offering the opportunity for competitors to include their products. That was pure bullying and could not happen in a truly competitive market. Some OEMs may have cut exclusive deals with MS, but others were simply forced. This was always my primary grievance with Microsoft and should have been the central issue of the anti-trust suits, not the silly bundling thing, which I always thought was perfectly reasonable. No one complains when MS bundles WordPad, even though it's a perfectly nice, if stripped down piece of software. Frankly, I'd choose WordPad over Word any day of the week.
So, yes, sometimes Microsoft has had superior products, although it's arguable whether anything of theirs today is the best in its field (I'd nominate Excel as a possibility, but I haven't used any competing products). I personally loved using Visual Studio 6 for many, many years, and I always liked XP. However, in the case of Vista, having had experience with every non-server OS from Microsoft going back to DOS 1, except Windows ME and NT 3,1, I have never found the transition to be as annoying and hassle-ridden as moving from XP to Vista, and Vista offers no feature that XP doesn't have that I find compelling or even interesting. And after spending a couple months using Vista shipped on a nice HP Pavilion
Oops! In my last message wanted to give you props for your cool Kraftwerk reference! Mine's a cool music reference too, but I don't expect too many people to get it.
Perhaps, but IE's broken standard is something everyone has to work towards and test against. It's certainly better than it used to be, but it is a perfect example, if not of e/e/e, then of people being forced to jump through hoops to support a clearly inferior product that cannot compete on functionality and stability.
It's like to 2004 election where the editor of Newsweek suggested that media bias automatically gave Kerry a 15% boost at the polls. Not to get too far into political analysis (and the minefields surrounding it), but Bush barely scraped by over a candidate that was totally uncharismatic, uninspiring and too far politically afield (left field) for the populace.
Of course, Bush is no Firefox (much more like IE), and you may disagree with the premise of my rather tenuous analogy, but IE starts with about a 95% popularity by default because it's on almost everyone's computer, and the clearly superior Firefox has been scraping by with a small percentage of users for years even though it blows IE out of the water in every measurable way.
On the other hand, the tide is turning and Firefox is increasing slowly but steadily. However, web developers still have to contend with the nightmare that is IE6 if they don't want to risk losing eyeballs because their sites simply don't work.
So this is more like embrace/extend/fail, but the fact that IE survived as long as it did in the truly horrible state that it was in, one that Microsoft clearly was happy with because they didn't even consider improvements until Firefox reminded them that they have almost never truly innovated*, merely copied, acquired or pretended "obsolete and broken" was the same as "innovative".
*Actually Microsoft Research innovates all the time, but their stuff never seems to make it into actual products.
So wait, you're telling me that despite the fact that NASA is so talented they can retroactively program a space probe from hundreds of millions of miles away to swing by Uranus and Neptune when they weren't even on the original itinerary _and_ take better pictures than originally possible when it got there, and despite the fact that they could land a space probe so gently on an asteroid that it wasn't damaged, that they would have to send a team of men up there, something which probably isn't even technologically feasible for the next 20 years, compared to figuring out some orbital mechanics (albeit with a significantly larger payload) that they've been doing successfully for decades?
I could hardly be more incredulous if you suggested stretching a giant net between satellites at opposite LaGrange points to simply bounce the thing away when it got too close.
The difference is that I don't owe Microsoft anything. They are trying to win back _my_ favor and _my_ custom. I don't care what they think of me. They should care, however, about what I think of them, because I'm one of their customers that they have lost.
Microsoft has everything to win and I have nothing to lose in this relationship. I'm very happy using open software and frankly I can't imagine a scenario where Microsoft could win back my trust, even one involving a public firing and condemnation of Ballmer and everything he stands for (although that would be a good start). I also can't imagine Microsoft making a product I would want or prefer to what I have now. They haven't done anything in many years that isn't completely unsuitable to my needs. I liked XP. Heck I _still_ like XP. But they killed XP and replaced it with something that I do not like and refuse to use. I don't owe them anything, but if they want my future business, they owe me a lot.
You don't seem to understand how the vendor/customer thing works.
It's not through evil hocus-pocus that everyone uses the non-standards complaint features.
*cough*Internet Explorer*cough
I've very familiar with MS
Really? Then you would be familiar with the fact that it was impossible to compete with Office without access to all the undocumented functionality in Windows 3. It was impossible to create an alternative software development kit with things like a debugger without access to all the undocumented functionality in Windows 3. By that point it was pretty much too late. The damage had been done and was permanent many years before antitrust lawsuits were in a gleam in the eye of people like Eliot Spitzer and the U.S. DOJ.
Microsoft strongarmed OEMs, preventing them from bundling many competitors' software packages with Windows. Ask Be, for instance. Microsoft's file formats have largely over history been partially or poorly documented, and even today, the standard for the formats runs to hundreds of pages and is about as comprehensible as the U.S. Tax Code (and given the fact that OOo sometimes handles broken Word files better than Word itself is an example that shows this is not all due to competence on Microsoft's part).
Microsoft has practiced "embrace, extend and extinguish" where they adopted standards, altered them in some non-standard, or simply buggy, way, breaking compatibility and crippling their competition... something that would not be possible if they weren't already a de facto monopoly.
Microsoft for many years constantly broke backwards compatibility in products like Office, deliberately forcing people towards updates they neither wanted nor needed. More recently, by prematurely killing Windows XP, even though it was still in great demand (I personally bought a copy in the last year after buying a new laptop for my wife that was _literally_ unusable with Vista, with which it came bundled) again they are forcing the market to adopt Vista, even though it is wholly inappropriate for much of the hardware (and software for that matter) out there. They tacitly admitted this by allowing a reprieve to XP's untimely demise, but only for certain low-end machines that would never be capable of running Vista. However, customers won't have a choice to stay with XP, even though it is perfectly adequately and superior to Vista in almost every measurable way.
As a Windows developer for more than 15 years, I'm guessing I'm just a little more familiar with Microsoft than you, if that one meager example is all you come up with. What you said wasn't even accurate: It was Windows 3 that was artificially rendered incompatible with DR-DOS (4DOS was a shell, not a full-blown OS). Windows 95 did not use a separate DOS, so it wouldn't make sense to consider using it with something like DR-DOS. If DOS was properly documented, there's no _good_ reason why an alternative OS couldn't run Windows. It was well known in the days of OS/2 Warp that it ran Windows programs faster and better than Windows itself, so competition was theoretically possible, except Microsoft made darned sure it never happened on a level playing field. I used OS/2 myself for a while, although I finally gave up with alternatives and even Windows 95 itself, after suffering with it for a few months, and switched to NT 3.51, which was rock-solid at the time, and continued to be quite stable, at least through XP.
Microsoft was essentially handed a monopoly by IBM, and once they had it, they did everything within their power, legal or not, to hang on to it, and today, but for their monopoly, they would have been defeated in the market years ago. That is literally the only advantage they have these days, and it is obvious by their actions and the quality of their recent products, that they know it. Microsoft will have to change radically if they are going to do anything but slowly decline, and frankly, despite the tremendous assets of talent and treasure they have at their disposal, their irrationally self-destructive and frankly evil upper management is likely incapable of understanding what it will take for Micro
Thanks for the info. Too bad there's not an update for OOo or antiword.
I always thought bundling the browser wasn't even an issue. It was all really Netscape crying like a little baby because they couldn't compete. Back in those days, IE was truly superior, especially when Netscape 4 came out. I remember installing it for the first time and watching it literally take 5 minutes "updating the registry". The thing was a huge bloated mess. Of course, MS hadn't done anything in the way of usability on the thing until Firefox reminded them what innovation was all about. Today IE is losing market share because the alternative is truly superior.
On the other hand, my wife got e-mailed a couple of attachments the other day. On was a .DOC file, and the other was .DOCX. What the hell is .DOCX? Why, it's a new XML format that only Office 2007 can open, of course. Microsoft is still up to their old ham-fisted tactics. I had to find some on-line conversion service to turn .DOCX into something readable because I don't have Office 2007 and you couldn't pay me to use Word (my wife has a student edition of Office 2003). It turns out it was just a simple letter. Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks for yet another in a long series of kicks to the groin, and more of my time wasted simply to serve the ego of that simian running your company.
I guess I don't see the need to respond to Microsoft's FUD with FUD of our own. After all, if it's wrong for them to do it, is it not also wrong for us?
It would be. But the term "FUD" implies deceit. FUD against Microsoft is much more likely to simply be true. They _are_ a monopoly. They _do_ use unfair practices to "compete". They _will_ stoop to almost any low to avoid a level playing field. This isn't FUD in the normal sense of the word. It's fact.
Users will avoid or completely abandon software that is difficult to learn.
So how do you explain Word, then? Oh, right, most people who use it have no other choice or don't realize there's another choice.
OOo Write is a lot better, but I've come to the conclusion that word processing is simply completely broken period. I think markup, like ReStructured text for most things and LaTeX if you're typesetting a calculus book or something is by far the most efficient way to go.
Microsoft doesn't compete fairly. Microsoft has never competed fairly. I'm not even sure Microsoft _could_ have ever competed fairly. I'm sure there's little difference between MS employees and Google employees except at the top. Then there's a big difference. Google's no corporate saint, but they also don't have a 30-year history of deceit, intimidation and downright theft. Microsoft has no interest in providing good products. They have no interest in allowing customers the option of choosing another vendor, but hoping they will choose Microsoft because it is truly better.
Microsoft simply does not Play Fair. They never have.
Any sane person would view any venture by Microsoft only in terms of deepest suspicion. Perhaps they have turned a corner. Frankly, I can't imagine that ever happening until they lose the hormonally-imbalanced bald guy, but maybe this is something done as much to be a good corporate citizen and advance the state of the art, instead of merely leverage their monopoly and trying their best to ruin everything that is not theirs. Nevertheless, they will rightfully need years to regain the trust of the industry.
I don't expect Microsoft to turn into a charity, or the EFF. They have every right to continue trying to be #1 and making money, at least if they do it legally. However, there are ways of succeeding that do not entail a slash-and-burn attitude towards the rest of the industry or treating your customers with nothing but contempt.
And as far as being an employee of Microsoft, by doing so you are giving implicit consent to their business practices. I could never do that, but if you who are employees can, then more power to you. It is certainly a lucrative job, and from I hear the bennies are great. The Microsoft employees (or ex-employees) that I have met have definitely been top-notch folks. But I feel people with that kind of talent and experience could do much more good working somewhere else. Still, a guy's gotta eat, you know. I used to work for AOL, so maybe I shouldn't talk...
Basically every data format Microsoft uses has some way to embed executable code or scripts. I guess it seemed like a great idea to them in the early 90's, and we live with the pain from that decision every day.
The obvious solution is to make steroids mandatory.
Shrug. Why do people think these problems are hard to solve?
But wouldn't a patent apply to one specific method for making that kind of chair, which is not, presumably using a 3D printer?
Of course, since the patent office rubber stamps anything you stick under their noses, I'm surprised no one has patented, say, a spoon with a screwdriver on the other end, or measuring time in hundredths of hours or any other trivial thing you could come up with.
#include "broken_patent_system_rant.h"
Well, I would give a big "Whoops!" there. The gun issue is ludicrous and the politicians opposed to gun rights are largely idiots, but then again the politicians who support gun rights are largely idiots too, just for different reasons. The "public debate" on these kinds of issues is embarrassingly dumb, and it's funny how the idea of merely owning a firearm being somehow evil didn't even occur until society had deteriorated to the point where large segments of the population are amoral walking ids.
However, I really have a hard time however understanding how someone who is against the objectification and degradation of women as being "twisted and evil"... I'm not talking pin-ups here. That is just the kind of upside-down twisted morality that is leading this society down a toilet. There is a fine, and perhaps completely artificial, line between "acceptable porn" that too many people seem to think is perfectly benign and things like kiddie-porn that most people seem to think is actually bad. I mean, does it really make any concrete difference whether the woman being exploited is 18 or 17? It's funny how the definition of what's "acceptable" is constantly being moved from year to year as people seek to justify their ever-increasing vices.
But please, continue to rationalize. It's fun to watch.
Regardless of the effectiveness of their tactics, I don't think the crusaders against child porn represent a "lunatic fringe". In fact, crusaders against porn in general don't represent a "lunatic fringe" either if you took the time to meet someone outside your little high school clique.
We've been coming full circle since forms were originally incorporated into HTML. Basically, the Web for the last 20 years, has more or less been reimplementing X Windows from scratch.
To be fair, I found "Life of Brian" to be mediocre at best despite a few mythically memorable line, although Monty Python in general is still de rigueur for geeks, and the 16-disc "Flying Circus" set can be had for less than $80 now, which is a good education for those poor saps that weren't even born when it was breaking ground and giving American teenagers an excuse to see intelligent, literate humor, goofy but brilliant slapstick and occasional boobies on late at night on public TV for decades.
I've noticed that a slight majority of people on the road are idiots and shouldn't have been given licenses, period. There does seem to be a correlation between driving an SUV and being an idiot, but there are idiots in all makes of cars.
Well, I must be lucky then, because I haven't had more problems compared to 7.10. Or maybe I'm more tolerant of them because I like to tinker so much. Nevertheless, I've gotten to the point where I totally prefer using Ubuntu to XP.
So yeah, adjusted for income, our justice system is colorblind.
Or more precisely, it's colorblind: It can only see green.
See? This is what's wrong with Open Source... it's run by a bunch of arrogant know-it-alls who hold users in contempt and have no interest in providing them with something that works and is useful. That's why I stick with proprietary, commerical software: because I'm a paying customer I'll be treated with respect!
Yeah, maybe they were ready to invest a million in Facebook Mr. Potato Head instead.
Hey, you never know when you might become Ed Harris with a blue hand trying to disarm a nuclear warhead on the sea floor. An iPhone would be really helpful!