OK, so you're a chef, and your knowledge is limited to personal desktop computing. That's your context, correct?
Not precisely. Before the bubble burst, I spent about 15 years in the computer industry. I was a field engineer, an operator, a system admin, a consultant, an engineer, a manager, and finally an executive. But the last business venture burned me out so hard I decided to just take a pass on the whole thing and open a restaurant. That was earlier this year.
Reading back through your posts is sickening.
I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
My wife wrote her dissertation in Word because I couldn't simplify SGML enough
My girlfriend wrote hers, in molecular genetics, in Word too, but not for the same reason. She did it because she liked Word just fine. I don't remember how many pages hers was-- something in the 300 range, like yours-- but she didn't have anything like the problems you described. Citations, tables of contents and figures, pagination; all worked perfectly.
Perhaps you guys were doing something wrong?
ask yourself how many people really want to get their computer advice from a chef?
I don't recall offering any advice. Just opinion. And my opinion is that Office would never have become the dominant product in its market if it were as bad as you say it is. The conclusion, therefore, is that it's nowhere near as bad as you say it is. The only outstanding question, then, is why you think so poorly of it.
I already tend to distrust Office because I cannot be assured that I will have a way to open documents made with it in the future.
How about with Office? If you're saving long-term archival copies of your documents without saving long-term archival copies of your applications, you're not doing a very good job.
And if long-term storage is your #1 priority, you'd be best served by getting rid of that computer completely. Paper is a much better long-term archive medium than any electronic format ever could be. Great user interface, too, and the ease of use just can't be beat. Paper is good for up to 100 years with no special precautions, or up to 500 years in an inert environment. Beyond that, consider photo-etching your documents onto a durable metal; nickel is a good candidate. Etched sheets of nickel-plated steel should last for 10,000 years or more in even the most unfriendly of environments.
Hey, if you're going to plan for the future, you might as well do it right. Right?
What is so wonderful about Surfwriter that I essentially encrypt my life and business with it?
Um. You do know that SurfWriter is a notional program used only for purposes of illustration, right? As far as I know, the idea was invented at Apple; the original Macintosh Toolbox developer documentation ("Inside Macintosh") included examples that referred to a word processor called SurfWriter. It's sort of been tradition to talk about SurfWriter (or SurfPaint, or SurfDB, or whatever) when you need to refer to a typical application without complicating matters by talking about a specific one.
EVERY It person on this planet will gladly throw outlook out of their offices or corperate in a second if they could
This statement is so wrong, I don't even know where to begin. Do you even know what Outlook and Exchange do? Email is just a small part of it. The public folder function alone is enough to seal the deal in many cases. Contact management, especially in a sales organization, is something that can't be half-assed. And calendaring, of course, is a critical function in a lot of environments.
The Outlook/Exchange combo isn't going anywhere until something comes along that can provide the same functionality, with the same or even greater ease of use.
Your attitude is typical of what's wrong with the "open source" developers in general, and why there is no competitor to the Microsoft productivity products in particular. Those guys-- as well as yourself, evidently-- tend to look at something like Outlook/Exchange and say, "That's simple! We can do that with Sendmail and IMAP!" without knowing what you're talking about, or thinking about the implications. The result is half-assed solutions (Evolution, Sendmail, "+group calendar system," whatever that means) that nobody takes seriously. This, more than anything else, is what stands in the way of a successful "open source" productivity product of any variety.
Well, that's not what people on http://www.fireflyfans.com or the offical board say....
Can't say I'm too familiar with those sources; I don't spend a lot of time looking at any of those. But I did get something from Joss earlier tonight that implied that I was a wee bit mistaken. That is, I was right, but not completely so. I humbly corrected myself here.
(And here hexapodia is not the key insight;-)
Hexapodia is always the key insight. If it doesn't seem that way, it's just because you don't have all the facts yet.
unfortunately it seems to be filthy (here in the US) from an ethical perspective
See, I really kind of check out at this point. I'd say that some of Microsoft's business practices have been illegal, and some of them have been heavy-handed, but I'm not personally aware of any that I'd call unethical. But maybe I use the word differently from you. My girlfriend is a doc, so we talk about ethics in that context pretty often. Questions like, "Can a clinically depressed patient give informed consent?" And, "At what point is it worse to continue treatment of a terminal disease than to discontinue it?" Stuff like that, real head-scratchers.
Microsoft, among other acts, used their monopoly position to coerce partners and vendors into signing deals that were good for Microsoft but bad for everybody else. That's not fair, but it's not genocide, either. It's illegal, and they should be punished for it somehow, but it's not something I get really worked up about. I like to think that I have a sense of perspective on this sort of thing. But maybe I'm just detached and indifferent. Hard to tell.
I never thought I would say this, but perhaps RMS is right about a few things.
Oh, come on. Let's not say things that we can't take back.;-)
I am for ethical business practices
I absolutely agree, but like I said, I might have a slightly different idea of ethics. In a competitive situation, if you have an advantage, I believe the right thing to do is to press that advantage. The closest example of this I can think of from my line of work is something that happened to me a few weeks ago at the restaurant. One of my purveyors got his hands on some Tasmanian steelhead trout, and he wanted to sell it to me at $21 a pound. Now, I buy thousands and thousands of dollars a month worth of fish from this guy; I'm an important customer. I told him he was gonna give me the trout-- his whole shipment of it-- for $10 a pound, or I was gonna take my business elsewhere. Now, I had a pretty good idea that he was buying the fish for right around that price, so I knew he wasn't going to take a huge loss or anything, but I pressed my advantage anyway. He offered it to me for $12, I told him I'd give him $11, and he said okay. Did I screw him? Maybe, in one sense. But he and I have a relationship, and relationships are about give and take. I screwed him on the Tasmanian trout, but I know for a fact that he makes a fortune off of me on the abalone and the conch, so it's a wash. If somebody from a regulatory agency looked at my business practices really closely sometime, they'd probably take serious issue, and maybe even find a way to fine me. But this is how things are done, and it's a system that works well for everybody.
I *am* debating the methods used to obtain that status, thereby questioning your "Credit where it's due." statement.
My position is real simple. Microsoft has built some kick-ass software. Their software hasn't been perfect, but it's been solid and functional, and wildly successful. They deserve recognition and respect for this fact. They deserve a sound spanking for breaking various laws, and maybe they deserve to be called bullies, but that doesn't change the fact that they've built some kick-ass software. Thus, credit where it's due.
BTW, the last I checked, "Aieeeeee" was French for "garlic".
Not where I come from. But be that as it may, I'm pretty sure it's also Italian for, "My boyfriend has sold his overcoat!" At least, so I gather from those operas my girlfriend makes me go to.
And just like the Hollywood remake of Insomnia, it grafts on a happy ending.
Um. Did you actually see Soderberg's Solaris? It's a tragedy, dude. There is nothing happy about that ending. Everybody dies, no one is redeemed, nobody lives happily ever anything. It's a hell of a downer.
Okay, so I have to eat a little crow here. Earlier I wrote that Fox has spent a lot on promotion. Turns out that this is, while accurate, not entirely complete. They spent a fortune on early promotion, before the show premiered, but ever since... well, I'll just quote what Joss wrote.
Needless to say, I'm BOWLED over by the RELENTLESS promotion our mother network has given the show. With the kind of campaign that can't help but reach hundreds of dozens of households, we can't fail to DEVOUR our timeslot.
Frankly, we both prefer AppleWorks word processing module to Word. However, I think AppleWorks presentation module is quite sucky, especially compared to PowerPoint on Windows.
I think that's kind of supporting my point. You guys prefer AppleWorks to Word for word processing (which, of course, is to words as food processing is to food), but you prefer PowerPoint to AppleWorks for presentations. If you needed PowerPoint more than you do, you would probably tip the scale over to Office rather than AppleWorks.
In business, PowerPoint is everywhere. Based on my limited but not insignificant experience as a cubicle-dweller, I would have to say that PowerPoint is used in the average corporation about as much-- or even more than!-- Word is. Because AppleWorks is strong on word processing but short on presentations, it's not going to compare favorably to Office in that sort of environment.
Overall, Office is a better productivity suite, to the average business user, than AppleWorks is.
The more choices, especially free choices, the less likely that any one will dominate the landscape.
In my opinion, the only way that could be a good thing is if file formats for word processors, spreadsheets, and presentations are all standardized; I don't long for the bad old days when everybody used a different word processor, and files always had to be converted.
I'm not sure how that can happen. Standardized formats, I mean. A Microsoft Word file can be incredibly complex, with embedded graphics and revision histories and annotations and all sorts of stuff. Heck, I believe that you can even embed voice annotations straight into a Word document. If your word processor doesn't implement voice annotations, it'll still have to know about them so it can know to ignore that part of the file without coughing up an error or worse. That puts a pretty serious burden on the shoulders of the people who develop all those word processors you mentioned, and I'm not sure how that could be worked out.
One the one hand you claim that Office dominates only because it is so much better than its competitors. On the other, you admit that it dominates because of the historical accident that it is compatible with itself and users have a barrier to switching.
Not precisely. I'm not saying that users have a barrier to switching. I'm saying that they have no compelling reason to switch. I guess you could call that a barrier if you want, but I don't think that's a very accurate way of describing it.
Look, it's really simple. Office is the most widely used productivity product. How did it get that way? By being better than its competitors. Any product that competes with Office will have to be better than Office for people to seriously consider it. In addition, because Office is so entrenched, competing products will have to be compatible with Office in order to be considered.
The typical "open source" approach-- the "it's more-or-less good enough for what I want" approach-- simply won't fly here. In order to make your product competitive with Office, you have to make it better than Office, and so far none of the alternatives are. Alternatives like Open Office, and, yeah, Gobe Productive, have basically nothing more than "we're not Microsoft" to recommend them. Which is fine if your goal is to be marginal. If your goal is to be competitive, though, you're going to have to raise your standards quite a bit.
Um. So? That page describes a programming course, "Computer Networks and Distributed Systems." Why would you expect to learn Microsoft Office in a programming course? Now, a business productivity class, on the other hand... there I would expect them to teach Microsoft Office. Along with how to use a fax machine, and how to make photocopies, and how to compose a proper business letter.
As you can see, we're talking about two completely different contexts. Maybe this is why you and I are clashing so dramatically on this subject.
I don't know what your deal is, but you should ask yourself what your personal investment is in Microsoft Office.
I don't know what your deal is, but you should ask yourself why you're so biased against Microsoft. Microsoft is deeply flawed, and some of their business practices are both unethical and illegal. But that doesn't mean that they're evil to the core. I'm just trying to get you to have a little perspective, and to give credit where it's due.
In your post, you basically said that Microsoft developed their products wrong. You think they should have focused on A, B, and C, while they were actually focused on X, Y, and Z. The fact that Microsoft has produced good products and sold them by the boatload seems to contradict this fact. Or are you one of those who claims that all Microsoft products are pure crap? Microsoft has produced more than their fair share of crap. Their software is generally pretty needlessly complex, and their user interfaces are awful. But the worst piece of software Microsoft has ever produced is still better than 90% of the stuff listed on Freshmeat. I've said it before: credit where it's due.
Oh, and as to your remarks about my livelihood: I'm a chef. I work in a restaurant for a living. I don't even have a computer at my place of business, unless you count the cash registers our waiters use. I couldn't really give a tinker's dam about Microsoft Office, except in the purely abstract sense. People who hop up and down on one leg yelling about how Microsoft is rotten to the core and how they never produced any decent software are just as bad as people who say Microsoft is perfect and Windows is the epitome of user friendliness. Balance in all things, especially in one's opinions.
The _Fire Upon the Deep_ nick shows you're intelligent.
The what?
(Just kidding. But since we're both intelligent, why can't we see each others' point of view? I'm saying Microsoft isn't completely bad, and that they've done some excellent work in developing Office. You're saying "quit defending Microsoft." I don't think you're being fair, or reasonable.)
Oh, you're a Mac user. That explains a lot. I've never seen a group more willing to bend over and grab their ankles.
How's this for grabbing my ankles? Fuck you, you ignorant son of a whore.
There. Now we're even. On with the show.
WTF happened to Outlook
Nothing. There has never been an Outlook in the Mac version of Office. There's a Mac version of Outlook, available separately and for free, but it only works as an Exchange Server client. I've only ever known one guy who used it and he was kinda... well, let's just say he wasn't the most critically minded soul you could ever hope to meet.
& what's this half-assed Outlook Express wannabe?
Are you talking about Entourage? It's actually a pretty nice piece of kit. Don't use it myself; I'm not big with the "personal information organizer" things these days. But back when I had contacts and appointments and shit to keep up with, it was actually a much nicer tool than Outlook 2000 was on my PC.
Also, you fail to mention ClarisWorks/AppleWorks
I mentioned AppleWorks in another post. The reason I didn't mention it in my comments about olden style word processors is because, if I remember, it didn't exist in those days. I'm talking about circa 1989, and ClarisWorks 1.0 didn't ship until late '91.
Incidentally, ClarisWorks (later AppleWorks) is a predecessor to Gobe Productive only in the sense that Scott Holdaway, Bob Hearn, Tom Hoke, Scott Lindsey and a few others worked on ClarisWorks before leaving to start Gobe. There's no code or IP shared between the ClarisWorks and Productive. So your statement isn't really accurate, you know.
I am hearing rumors of firefly being cancelled, or are they just rumors?
The Straight Shit:
Firefly has been placed on hiatus. What that means is that Fox has not ordered any additional episodes beyond the ones (15, I think) that have already been produced. This does not mean the show has been cancelled; when a show goes on hiatus, that means the network is trying to figure out what their next step should be. They can move the show to another night, or re-tool it somehow with the cooperation of the producers, or they can just give up on it completely. The decision has not been made yet.
I believe that Fox knows the show is in a timeslot-of-death. Friday night at 8:00 is not a particularly fertile ground in which to plant the seed of an hour-long, serious, continuity-heavy, science-fiction drama. So the prevailing opinion is that Fox is going to find a new night and time for the show. The leading candidate as of a few days ago was Monday night at 9:00, but rumors have surfaced around the office lately that they're considering Thursday night at 8:00, opposite "Survivor" and "Friends."
Moving Firefly to a new timeslot would be good, and an easy fix. A somewhat harder fix might come if the network decides to go to M.E. with notes. Joss doesn't typically respond well to notes. He's a reasonable guy and all, but he's not big with the compromising of his vision. See, Joss is a thinker, and he's already got most everything he wants to do with Firefly for the next year or two planned out in his head. If Fox comes in with notes that say, "Drop three main characters and introduce a romantic interest for the captain," he'll probably not be too agreeable. At that point, M.E. has the option of either going along to get along, closing down the show, or shopping it around to another network. And they're not in the greatest position to shop it around to another network right now.
But the bottom line is that Firefly has metric assloads of critical acclaim, and a positively rabid fan-base. Fox knows that it's possible to take a little show with a few dedicated fans and turn it into a hit: see X-Files, The. They're not in any big hurry to cancel the show until they're sure it's not going anywhere.
For evidence of this, just think about David E. Kelly's last show, "Girls' Club." Fox dropped that particular hot potato after only two episodes aired. They knew that the show was going nowhere, and had no particular hopes of saving it. So they cut their losses. The fact that they haven't done this with Firefly is reassuring in the extreme.
Yes, but it's all about how you get there. Microsoft destroyed Netscape by tying their browser to the OS. (Later, they put the last nails in the coffin by producing a much better browser than Netscape's.) They've won the office productivity war, however, almost exclusively on the strength of their products. Credit where it's due.
Of course, people might read your argument & accept some of it based on your intensity, you reject everything out of hand. That's FUD, bud.
Uh. No. FUD stands for "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." It annoys me when people misapply "FUD" almost as much as it annoys me when people misapply "monopoly."
The bundling is everything.
I've said this before. Consider the contrast between the way Microsoft handled IE and the way they handed Office. IE is part of the operating system now; it can't be removed at all. Office is not part of the OS. It's an optional product that you have to go out and buy. Microsoft used their operating system monopoly to destroy Netscape, by integrating IE into the OS. They have done no such thing with Office.
Microsoft has abused their monopoly power on several occasions. This isn't one of them. Don't discredit yourself by making false or overstated accusations.
In my experience, Office is mediocre at best
Compared to what, I wonder?
If you're not getting paid to astroturf....
So now anybody who has a balanced opinion of Microsoft is an astroturfer? Whatever you say, friend.
I'm going to call you on your comment about mindshare and monopoly power.
Hmm.
Okay, look, I stand by my comment about monopoly power. Compare the way Microsoft has handled IE versus the way they've handled Office. IE is integrated into the OS, and given away for free. That's abuse of monopoly, clearly; you can't get Windows without IE, so trying to compete with IE is suicide. But Office is just the opposite. Microsoft doesn't even bundle it with the OS, much less integrate it, and they charge a fortune for it. Clearly that's not monopoly abuse.
I may, on the other hand, have been wrong about the mindshare issue. If you mutter "spreadsheet" and 50,000 people all scream "Excel!" back at you, that's not something that's easy to overcome.
I was going to respond by pointing out that, with 2 PCI-X slots and on-board gigabit ethernet, it's clear that this machine is built to be a server
PCI-X is new, but are you aware that most Macs have come with built-in Gigabit Ethernet for some time now? The Power Macs and PowerBooks all come with 1000BASE-T. The iBooks and iMacs, I believe, still come with puny 100BASE-T, but you get what you pay for.;-)
The day is coming, sooner rather than later, when all computers that currently have built-in 100BASE-T will have built-in gigabit instead.
I don't think so. I think you're absolutely right. People don't buy computers so they can sit there and go mmmmm in the corner. They buy them for the software.
You own a PC because you find that the software you want is available exclusively, or at the best price, on the PC. I own a Mac for the exact same reason.
I think they use it because schools and universities get pulled in by Microsoft, and it becomes the default office product on school and campus.
Isn't it much more likely that Office is the default product on campuses because it's the most popular product in the marketplace? A school that taught only obscure tools while ignoring the most popular tools wouldn't be doing its students much of a service, would it?
If people stopped using Office more than any other tool-- indeed, if proficiency with Office were no longer an effective requirement for employment in most industries-- the schools would stop teaching it.
Astroturf? Heh. Read my posting history, you twit. This is a relatively new account, but I've been posting on Slashdot for years. I've made lots of friends and a few enemies in that time. I've been accused of being a fascist, a religious zealot, and a troll, but never an astroturf.
Office is dominant because of closed document formats. Period.
Office is dominant because it is superior to any of the alternatives. For as long as I can remember, exchanging word processing documents has been no problem. I remember using Microsoft Word 4 for the Mac (under System 6, even), and exchanging files with people who used FullWrite Professional, or WriteNow, or Nisus Writer. Closed, open, whatever, those programs could all read and write the Word file format without any noticeable trouble.
The thing was, generally speaking, Word was a better word processor than the others. Microsoft Word 4 was the shit when it came to producing long documents. I wrote a lot of stuff with Word 4.
Then came Word 5 and Word 6, which were pretty lame, but they were still better than the competing products. So, over the years, Microsoft Word became the dominant Mac word processor. The story on the DOS, and later Windows, side is similar.
You can argue that it was about file formats all you like, but it never was. It was about features and ease-of-use.
They think in terms of "the Next Product to sell to the customer", instead of trying to make it "really" good.
Monday-morning quarterback. When you own your own multinational software corporation, you can make your own decisions about what features to implement. Until then, saying "Microsoft did it wrong" is kind of a cheap way out, isn't it?
Nobody can complete is because the ability to compete requires the ability to read and write a file format that they keep secret. That is monopoly behavior.
No, it's not. I have written a word processor with exciting new features. It's called SurfWriter. I refuse to tell you the file format, because I don't want anybody else reading or writing SurfWriter files. This is not monopoly behavior. It's a simple business decision.
If Word was so good they should be able to compete just fine reading and writing an open file format.
Well, seeing as how just about every program can read and write Word files as it is, I'd say that this is, in fact, the case. But the important point here is that they don't have to. If Microsoft wants to keep their file format secret, they're free to do so.
If MS hadn't obtained their 95+% monopoly in desktop OS market share, might WordPerfect or some other alternative (remember Ami Pro?) became just as good as Word is now?
I don't think so. As far as I know, Microsoft has never bundled any version of Office, or its predecessors, with any version of Windows or DOS. (If I'm wrong, correct me; also, I'm aware that some vendors bundle Office with their computers, but that's not the same thing at all.) So you've always had to go out and buy Office if you want to use it. I don't see how Microsoft's market position in the OS arena has any bearing at all.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so you're a chef, and your knowledge is limited to personal desktop computing. That's your context, correct?
Not precisely. Before the bubble burst, I spent about 15 years in the computer industry. I was a field engineer, an operator, a system admin, a consultant, an engineer, a manager, and finally an executive. But the last business venture burned me out so hard I decided to just take a pass on the whole thing and open a restaurant. That was earlier this year.
Reading back through your posts is sickening.
I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
My wife wrote her dissertation in Word because I couldn't simplify SGML enough
My girlfriend wrote hers, in molecular genetics, in Word too, but not for the same reason. She did it because she liked Word just fine. I don't remember how many pages hers was-- something in the 300 range, like yours-- but she didn't have anything like the problems you described. Citations, tables of contents and figures, pagination; all worked perfectly.
Perhaps you guys were doing something wrong?
ask yourself how many people really want to get their computer advice from a chef?
I don't recall offering any advice. Just opinion. And my opinion is that Office would never have become the dominant product in its market if it were as bad as you say it is. The conclusion, therefore, is that it's nowhere near as bad as you say it is. The only outstanding question, then, is why you think so poorly of it.
I already tend to distrust Office because I cannot be assured that I will have a way to open documents made with it in the future.
How about with Office? If you're saving long-term archival copies of your documents without saving long-term archival copies of your applications, you're not doing a very good job.
And if long-term storage is your #1 priority, you'd be best served by getting rid of that computer completely. Paper is a much better long-term archive medium than any electronic format ever could be. Great user interface, too, and the ease of use just can't be beat. Paper is good for up to 100 years with no special precautions, or up to 500 years in an inert environment. Beyond that, consider photo-etching your documents onto a durable metal; nickel is a good candidate. Etched sheets of nickel-plated steel should last for 10,000 years or more in even the most unfriendly of environments.
Hey, if you're going to plan for the future, you might as well do it right. Right?
What is so wonderful about Surfwriter that I essentially encrypt my life and business with it?
Um. You do know that SurfWriter is a notional program used only for purposes of illustration, right? As far as I know, the idea was invented at Apple; the original Macintosh Toolbox developer documentation ("Inside Macintosh") included examples that referred to a word processor called SurfWriter. It's sort of been tradition to talk about SurfWriter (or SurfPaint, or SurfDB, or whatever) when you need to refer to a typical application without complicating matters by talking about a specific one.
Just, you know, FYI.
EVERY It person on this planet will gladly throw outlook out of their offices or corperate in a second if they could
This statement is so wrong, I don't even know where to begin. Do you even know what Outlook and Exchange do? Email is just a small part of it. The public folder function alone is enough to seal the deal in many cases. Contact management, especially in a sales organization, is something that can't be half-assed. And calendaring, of course, is a critical function in a lot of environments.
The Outlook/Exchange combo isn't going anywhere until something comes along that can provide the same functionality, with the same or even greater ease of use.
Your attitude is typical of what's wrong with the "open source" developers in general, and why there is no competitor to the Microsoft productivity products in particular. Those guys-- as well as yourself, evidently-- tend to look at something like Outlook/Exchange and say, "That's simple! We can do that with Sendmail and IMAP!" without knowing what you're talking about, or thinking about the implications. The result is half-assed solutions (Evolution, Sendmail, "+group calendar system," whatever that means) that nobody takes seriously. This, more than anything else, is what stands in the way of a successful "open source" productivity product of any variety.
Well, that's not what people on http://www.fireflyfans.com or the offical board say....
;-)
Can't say I'm too familiar with those sources; I don't spend a lot of time looking at any of those. But I did get something from Joss earlier tonight that implied that I was a wee bit mistaken. That is, I was right, but not completely so. I humbly corrected myself here.
(And here hexapodia is not the key insight
Hexapodia is always the key insight. If it doesn't seem that way, it's just because you don't have all the facts yet.
unfortunately it seems to be filthy (here in the US) from an ethical perspective
;-)
See, I really kind of check out at this point. I'd say that some of Microsoft's business practices have been illegal, and some of them have been heavy-handed, but I'm not personally aware of any that I'd call unethical. But maybe I use the word differently from you. My girlfriend is a doc, so we talk about ethics in that context pretty often. Questions like, "Can a clinically depressed patient give informed consent?" And, "At what point is it worse to continue treatment of a terminal disease than to discontinue it?" Stuff like that, real head-scratchers.
Microsoft, among other acts, used their monopoly position to coerce partners and vendors into signing deals that were good for Microsoft but bad for everybody else. That's not fair, but it's not genocide, either. It's illegal, and they should be punished for it somehow, but it's not something I get really worked up about. I like to think that I have a sense of perspective on this sort of thing. But maybe I'm just detached and indifferent. Hard to tell.
I never thought I would say this, but perhaps RMS is right about a few things.
Oh, come on. Let's not say things that we can't take back.
I am for ethical business practices
I absolutely agree, but like I said, I might have a slightly different idea of ethics. In a competitive situation, if you have an advantage, I believe the right thing to do is to press that advantage. The closest example of this I can think of from my line of work is something that happened to me a few weeks ago at the restaurant. One of my purveyors got his hands on some Tasmanian steelhead trout, and he wanted to sell it to me at $21 a pound. Now, I buy thousands and thousands of dollars a month worth of fish from this guy; I'm an important customer. I told him he was gonna give me the trout-- his whole shipment of it-- for $10 a pound, or I was gonna take my business elsewhere. Now, I had a pretty good idea that he was buying the fish for right around that price, so I knew he wasn't going to take a huge loss or anything, but I pressed my advantage anyway. He offered it to me for $12, I told him I'd give him $11, and he said okay. Did I screw him? Maybe, in one sense. But he and I have a relationship, and relationships are about give and take. I screwed him on the Tasmanian trout, but I know for a fact that he makes a fortune off of me on the abalone and the conch, so it's a wash. If somebody from a regulatory agency looked at my business practices really closely sometime, they'd probably take serious issue, and maybe even find a way to fine me. But this is how things are done, and it's a system that works well for everybody.
I *am* debating the methods used to obtain that status, thereby questioning your "Credit where it's due." statement.
My position is real simple. Microsoft has built some kick-ass software. Their software hasn't been perfect, but it's been solid and functional, and wildly successful. They deserve recognition and respect for this fact. They deserve a sound spanking for breaking various laws, and maybe they deserve to be called bullies, but that doesn't change the fact that they've built some kick-ass software. Thus, credit where it's due.
BTW, the last I checked, "Aieeeeee" was French for "garlic".
Not where I come from. But be that as it may, I'm pretty sure it's also Italian for, "My boyfriend has sold his overcoat!" At least, so I gather from those operas my girlfriend makes me go to.
And just like the Hollywood remake of Insomnia, it grafts on a happy ending.
Um. Did you actually see Soderberg's Solaris? It's a tragedy, dude. There is nothing happy about that ending. Everybody dies, no one is redeemed, nobody lives happily ever anything. It's a hell of a downer.
My household is Microsoft free. We don't need to support a criminal monopoly.
Nice to see that your opinion isn't biased or anything.
Sheesh.
Frankly, we both prefer AppleWorks word processing module to Word. However, I think AppleWorks presentation module is quite sucky, especially compared to PowerPoint on Windows.
I think that's kind of supporting my point. You guys prefer AppleWorks to Word for word processing (which, of course, is to words as food processing is to food), but you prefer PowerPoint to AppleWorks for presentations. If you needed PowerPoint more than you do, you would probably tip the scale over to Office rather than AppleWorks.
In business, PowerPoint is everywhere. Based on my limited but not insignificant experience as a cubicle-dweller, I would have to say that PowerPoint is used in the average corporation about as much-- or even more than!-- Word is. Because AppleWorks is strong on word processing but short on presentations, it's not going to compare favorably to Office in that sort of environment.
Overall, Office is a better productivity suite, to the average business user, than AppleWorks is.
The more choices, especially free choices, the less likely that any one will dominate the landscape.
In my opinion, the only way that could be a good thing is if file formats for word processors, spreadsheets, and presentations are all standardized; I don't long for the bad old days when everybody used a different word processor, and files always had to be converted.
I'm not sure how that can happen. Standardized formats, I mean. A Microsoft Word file can be incredibly complex, with embedded graphics and revision histories and annotations and all sorts of stuff. Heck, I believe that you can even embed voice annotations straight into a Word document. If your word processor doesn't implement voice annotations, it'll still have to know about them so it can know to ignore that part of the file without coughing up an error or worse. That puts a pretty serious burden on the shoulders of the people who develop all those word processors you mentioned, and I'm not sure how that could be worked out.
One the one hand you claim that Office dominates only because it is so much better than its competitors. On the other, you admit that it dominates because of the historical accident that it is compatible with itself and users have a barrier to switching.
Not precisely. I'm not saying that users have a barrier to switching. I'm saying that they have no compelling reason to switch. I guess you could call that a barrier if you want, but I don't think that's a very accurate way of describing it.
Look, it's really simple. Office is the most widely used productivity product. How did it get that way? By being better than its competitors. Any product that competes with Office will have to be better than Office for people to seriously consider it. In addition, because Office is so entrenched, competing products will have to be compatible with Office in order to be considered.
The typical "open source" approach-- the "it's more-or-less good enough for what I want" approach-- simply won't fly here. In order to make your product competitive with Office, you have to make it better than Office, and so far none of the alternatives are. Alternatives like Open Office, and, yeah, Gobe Productive, have basically nothing more than "we're not Microsoft" to recommend them. Which is fine if your goal is to be marginal. If your goal is to be competitive, though, you're going to have to raise your standards quite a bit.
Vinge would kick your ass for this kind of crap.
Um. So? That page describes a programming course, "Computer Networks and Distributed Systems." Why would you expect to learn Microsoft Office in a programming course? Now, a business productivity class, on the other hand... there I would expect them to teach Microsoft Office. Along with how to use a fax machine, and how to make photocopies, and how to compose a proper business letter.
As you can see, we're talking about two completely different contexts. Maybe this is why you and I are clashing so dramatically on this subject.
I don't know what your deal is, but you should ask yourself what your personal investment is in Microsoft Office.
I don't know what your deal is, but you should ask yourself why you're so biased against Microsoft. Microsoft is deeply flawed, and some of their business practices are both unethical and illegal. But that doesn't mean that they're evil to the core. I'm just trying to get you to have a little perspective, and to give credit where it's due.
In your post, you basically said that Microsoft developed their products wrong. You think they should have focused on A, B, and C, while they were actually focused on X, Y, and Z. The fact that Microsoft has produced good products and sold them by the boatload seems to contradict this fact. Or are you one of those who claims that all Microsoft products are pure crap? Microsoft has produced more than their fair share of crap. Their software is generally pretty needlessly complex, and their user interfaces are awful. But the worst piece of software Microsoft has ever produced is still better than 90% of the stuff listed on Freshmeat. I've said it before: credit where it's due.
Oh, and as to your remarks about my livelihood: I'm a chef. I work in a restaurant for a living. I don't even have a computer at my place of business, unless you count the cash registers our waiters use. I couldn't really give a tinker's dam about Microsoft Office, except in the purely abstract sense. People who hop up and down on one leg yelling about how Microsoft is rotten to the core and how they never produced any decent software are just as bad as people who say Microsoft is perfect and Windows is the epitome of user friendliness. Balance in all things, especially in one's opinions.
The _Fire Upon the Deep_ nick shows you're intelligent.
The what?
(Just kidding. But since we're both intelligent, why can't we see each others' point of view? I'm saying Microsoft isn't completely bad, and that they've done some excellent work in developing Office. You're saying "quit defending Microsoft." I don't think you're being fair, or reasonable.)
Oh, you're a Mac user. That explains a lot. I've never seen a group more willing to bend over and grab their ankles.
How's this for grabbing my ankles? Fuck you, you ignorant son of a whore.
There. Now we're even. On with the show.
WTF happened to Outlook
Nothing. There has never been an Outlook in the Mac version of Office. There's a Mac version of Outlook, available separately and for free, but it only works as an Exchange Server client. I've only ever known one guy who used it and he was kinda... well, let's just say he wasn't the most critically minded soul you could ever hope to meet.
& what's this half-assed Outlook Express wannabe?
Are you talking about Entourage? It's actually a pretty nice piece of kit. Don't use it myself; I'm not big with the "personal information organizer" things these days. But back when I had contacts and appointments and shit to keep up with, it was actually a much nicer tool than Outlook 2000 was on my PC.
Also, you fail to mention ClarisWorks/AppleWorks
I mentioned AppleWorks in another post. The reason I didn't mention it in my comments about olden style word processors is because, if I remember, it didn't exist in those days. I'm talking about circa 1989, and ClarisWorks 1.0 didn't ship until late '91.
Incidentally, ClarisWorks (later AppleWorks) is a predecessor to Gobe Productive only in the sense that Scott Holdaway, Bob Hearn, Tom Hoke, Scott Lindsey and a few others worked on ClarisWorks before leaving to start Gobe. There's no code or IP shared between the ClarisWorks and Productive. So your statement isn't really accurate, you know.
I am hearing rumors of firefly being cancelled, or are they just rumors?
The Straight Shit:
Firefly has been placed on hiatus. What that means is that Fox has not ordered any additional episodes beyond the ones (15, I think) that have already been produced. This does not mean the show has been cancelled; when a show goes on hiatus, that means the network is trying to figure out what their next step should be. They can move the show to another night, or re-tool it somehow with the cooperation of the producers, or they can just give up on it completely. The decision has not been made yet.
I believe that Fox knows the show is in a timeslot-of-death. Friday night at 8:00 is not a particularly fertile ground in which to plant the seed of an hour-long, serious, continuity-heavy, science-fiction drama. So the prevailing opinion is that Fox is going to find a new night and time for the show. The leading candidate as of a few days ago was Monday night at 9:00, but rumors have surfaced around the office lately that they're considering Thursday night at 8:00, opposite "Survivor" and "Friends."
Moving Firefly to a new timeslot would be good, and an easy fix. A somewhat harder fix might come if the network decides to go to M.E. with notes. Joss doesn't typically respond well to notes. He's a reasonable guy and all, but he's not big with the compromising of his vision. See, Joss is a thinker, and he's already got most everything he wants to do with Firefly for the next year or two planned out in his head. If Fox comes in with notes that say, "Drop three main characters and introduce a romantic interest for the captain," he'll probably not be too agreeable. At that point, M.E. has the option of either going along to get along, closing down the show, or shopping it around to another network. And they're not in the greatest position to shop it around to another network right now.
But the bottom line is that Firefly has metric assloads of critical acclaim, and a positively rabid fan-base. Fox knows that it's possible to take a little show with a few dedicated fans and turn it into a hit: see X-Files, The. They're not in any big hurry to cancel the show until they're sure it's not going anywhere.
For evidence of this, just think about David E. Kelly's last show, "Girls' Club." Fox dropped that particular hot potato after only two episodes aired. They knew that the show was going nowhere, and had no particular hopes of saving it. So they cut their losses. The fact that they haven't done this with Firefly is reassuring in the extreme.
if I mutter "browser', 50,000 people scream "IE".
"Aieeeeeee!"
Yes, but it's all about how you get there. Microsoft destroyed Netscape by tying their browser to the OS. (Later, they put the last nails in the coffin by producing a much better browser than Netscape's.) They've won the office productivity war, however, almost exclusively on the strength of their products. Credit where it's due.
Of course, people might read your argument & accept some of it based on your intensity, you reject everything out of hand. That's FUD, bud.
Uh. No. FUD stands for "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." It annoys me when people misapply "FUD" almost as much as it annoys me when people misapply "monopoly."
The bundling is everything.
I've said this before. Consider the contrast between the way Microsoft handled IE and the way they handed Office. IE is part of the operating system now; it can't be removed at all. Office is not part of the OS. It's an optional product that you have to go out and buy. Microsoft used their operating system monopoly to destroy Netscape, by integrating IE into the OS. They have done no such thing with Office.
Microsoft has abused their monopoly power on several occasions. This isn't one of them. Don't discredit yourself by making false or overstated accusations.
In my experience, Office is mediocre at best
Compared to what, I wonder?
If you're not getting paid to astroturf....
So now anybody who has a balanced opinion of Microsoft is an astroturfer? Whatever you say, friend.
I'm going to call you on your comment about mindshare and monopoly power.
;-)
Hmm.
Okay, look, I stand by my comment about monopoly power. Compare the way Microsoft has handled IE versus the way they've handled Office. IE is integrated into the OS, and given away for free. That's abuse of monopoly, clearly; you can't get Windows without IE, so trying to compete with IE is suicide. But Office is just the opposite. Microsoft doesn't even bundle it with the OS, much less integrate it, and they charge a fortune for it. Clearly that's not monopoly abuse.
I may, on the other hand, have been wrong about the mindshare issue. If you mutter "spreadsheet" and 50,000 people all scream "Excel!" back at you, that's not something that's easy to overcome.
All right, let's call it a draw.
I was going to respond by pointing out that, with 2 PCI-X slots and on-board gigabit ethernet, it's clear that this machine is built to be a server
;-)
PCI-X is new, but are you aware that most Macs have come with built-in Gigabit Ethernet for some time now? The Power Macs and PowerBooks all come with 1000BASE-T. The iBooks and iMacs, I believe, still come with puny 100BASE-T, but you get what you pay for.
The day is coming, sooner rather than later, when all computers that currently have built-in 100BASE-T will have built-in gigabit instead.
I guess that's flamebait for both sides isn't it?
I don't think so. I think you're absolutely right. People don't buy computers so they can sit there and go mmmmm in the corner. They buy them for the software.
You own a PC because you find that the software you want is available exclusively, or at the best price, on the PC. I own a Mac for the exact same reason.
No flamebait here.
I think they use it because schools and universities get pulled in by Microsoft, and it becomes the default office product on school and campus.
Isn't it much more likely that Office is the default product on campuses because it's the most popular product in the marketplace? A school that taught only obscure tools while ignoring the most popular tools wouldn't be doing its students much of a service, would it?
If people stopped using Office more than any other tool-- indeed, if proficiency with Office were no longer an effective requirement for employment in most industries-- the schools would stop teaching it.
Astroturf? Heh. Read my posting history, you twit. This is a relatively new account, but I've been posting on Slashdot for years. I've made lots of friends and a few enemies in that time. I've been accused of being a fascist, a religious zealot, and a troll, but never an astroturf.
Office is dominant because of closed document formats. Period.
Office is dominant because it is superior to any of the alternatives. For as long as I can remember, exchanging word processing documents has been no problem. I remember using Microsoft Word 4 for the Mac (under System 6, even), and exchanging files with people who used FullWrite Professional, or WriteNow, or Nisus Writer. Closed, open, whatever, those programs could all read and write the Word file format without any noticeable trouble.
The thing was, generally speaking, Word was a better word processor than the others. Microsoft Word 4 was the shit when it came to producing long documents. I wrote a lot of stuff with Word 4.
Then came Word 5 and Word 6, which were pretty lame, but they were still better than the competing products. So, over the years, Microsoft Word became the dominant Mac word processor. The story on the DOS, and later Windows, side is similar.
You can argue that it was about file formats all you like, but it never was. It was about features and ease-of-use.
They think in terms of "the Next Product to sell to the customer", instead of trying to make it "really" good.
Monday-morning quarterback. When you own your own multinational software corporation, you can make your own decisions about what features to implement. Until then, saying "Microsoft did it wrong" is kind of a cheap way out, isn't it?
Nobody can complete is because the ability to compete requires the ability to read and write a file format that they keep secret. That is monopoly behavior.
No, it's not. I have written a word processor with exciting new features. It's called SurfWriter. I refuse to tell you the file format, because I don't want anybody else reading or writing SurfWriter files. This is not monopoly behavior. It's a simple business decision.
If Word was so good they should be able to compete just fine reading and writing an open file format.
Well, seeing as how just about every program can read and write Word files as it is, I'd say that this is, in fact, the case. But the important point here is that they don't have to. If Microsoft wants to keep their file format secret, they're free to do so.
Gunpowders have oxidizers already in them. Just an FYI.
Yeah, I thought that might be true as I was writing my post, but I was too lazy to fact-check myself. Oops.
Can gunpowder burn, then, in a vacuum? Or does it still require ambient oxygen to ignite?
If MS hadn't obtained their 95+% monopoly in desktop OS market share, might WordPerfect or some other alternative (remember Ami Pro?) became just as good as Word is now?
I don't think so. As far as I know, Microsoft has never bundled any version of Office, or its predecessors, with any version of Windows or DOS. (If I'm wrong, correct me; also, I'm aware that some vendors bundle Office with their computers, but that's not the same thing at all.) So you've always had to go out and buy Office if you want to use it. I don't see how Microsoft's market position in the OS arena has any bearing at all.