"What's got MS scared is that their customers are just waiting until the day it can"
That's the clincher!
The real hit for Microsoft is going to be if Open Office starts going past them (and I mean end-user features, and not just something like export to PDF)*. Then, people will start switching, and then the game will be really on.
There's a whole thing about Microsoft - seems to me they've pissed off any friend they ever had, and this has given Linux a huge amount of corporate support.
Owning the operating system is like being the landlord of a shopping mall. In Microsoft's case, they've got the tenants in, let them bring in customers to grow a business, and then put competitors next door.
There was a time that I had a huge amount of respect for Microsoft. It was around the Excel 4/Word 2 time. They seemed to make great products that IMO were the best in the PC market.
The things that could be done with section numbering, the ease of use, they were just great. And I tried other things at the same time, and they just weren't as good.
Now, it seems that they don't really care about innovating their office product. The stuff added post Office 97 is not even worth a $20 upgrade.
To me, it's one of the few things that government should be involved in.
Protecting the market comes into the same space as protecting people's property and rights.
Of course, the governments could start by getting their own houses in order, like the Inland Revenue in the UK who don't support Mozilla browsers. If government insisted on Open Office document format for contracts etc, a lot more companies would at least try Open Office out.
The biggest issues I've seen in internal software departments are:-
1. People not knowing what each other is up to. So someone builds a reusable module, but no-one knows about it.
2. People not working through the impact of changes in one part of a system on another. How do I find out all the places that a particularly column on a database table can be updated? How do I find out what it is set to? OK. This can be done, but it's very long winded.
3. Fragmentation of tools. As an ex-mainframe guy, we had COBOL and JCL. Now, people download pieces of software, build things in different tools. All these tools require training, which takes time to become mature in them (and often are discarded before maturity occurs).
4. Specs and code don't match. We should be at a point by now that this isn't an issue. The spec should be the code and the tool should run from the spec.
I've read this and can see nothing that states how you get from current position to a software factory. All I can see is "this doesn't work" and "this would be good", but nothing about how you organise it or anything.
I guess it must have been interesting being involved in a project involving an emotionless robot snooker player. Did you keep in touch with Steve afterwards?;)
(to be fair, the bloke's got a sparkling wit and milked the "interesting" part).
If you are in the right, and someone is deliberately trying to screw you over, it's sometimes better to let people raise the profile of their complaint. The more and the higher people they tell, the more they will be discredited when you prove them wrong.
When the whole "millions of lines of code" thing is buried (when SCO collapse), the next time someone comes up with a dubious IP claim, there will be thousands of people saying "what, like SCO?".
IE and Office are two packages that provide certain business functionality. There are plenty of others out there that provide similar functionality like OpenOffice and Firefox.
You know what, my OpenOffice attachments don't open when I send them to word users. What a piece of junk Word is. And in Microsoft's case, they could support it as OpenOffice uses an open standard for documents, unlike Word which is closed or cost-licensed. For the zillionth time, THAT'S WHY OPEN OFFICE CAN'T READ.DOC, not because they don't want to.
Firefox doesn't render pages "properly" because those pages aren't produced "properly". They've stepped outside the standards. Does IE render pages with transparent PNGs properly? Nope.
You are right about one thing. Firefox isn't near the level of IE. It's way above it. Have you ever actually seen or used it?
For the upgrade I did, I had to open the case and invalidate the warranty and pop the chips in.
If you are thinking of the old 16K Ram Pack on the ZX81, then the number of these would be 64,000. They were unstable enough with 1. If each was about 2 inches high, that would be about 10,000ft tall!
At a time when people are investing so much effort in defending their "intellectual property", the internet will bring it all down. Not so much because of copyright infringement, but because the distance and cost from information producer to user have both shrunk.
Old media used to have barriers to entry. You needed distribution networks for newspapers, or the huge expenditure for TV. The net costs little.
I've heard a lot of people say things like "but how will make any money out of it". And you know what? It's the wrong question.
Just because a business has existed to provide something doesn't mean that there's a place for that business anymore, or that it can't move from large scale to small scale.
Also, the choice is much larger. My newsagent has a maximum of something like 500 news sources. The net has thousands and thousands.
Not exactly showing off, but I think people often judge themselves by the stuff they can afford to buy.
I've met people who really, really wanted to own a BMW. They know that a ferrari is off the scale, but a BMW is a symbol of reaching a club above where they are, in other words that they have exceeded their own expectations.
The statement I made about brands wasn't my assertion, but something I heard in a report years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
seriously. someone told me that MBAs teach you nothing about really running a business.
That's the clincher!
The real hit for Microsoft is going to be if Open Office starts going past them (and I mean end-user features, and not just something like export to PDF)*. Then, people will start switching, and then the game will be really on.
Owning the operating system is like being the landlord of a shopping mall. In Microsoft's case, they've got the tenants in, let them bring in customers to grow a business, and then put competitors next door.
Which is the biggest computer company in the world?
Just do "Start...shutdown". OK, programs won't be running, but that's hardly a feature I've been too worried about.
Were the people in charge at IBM at the time just agreeing to anything in order to make sure they could get a PC out there fast?
The things that could be done with section numbering, the ease of use, they were just great. And I tried other things at the same time, and they just weren't as good.
Now, it seems that they don't really care about innovating their office product. The stuff added post Office 97 is not even worth a $20 upgrade.
Protecting the market comes into the same space as protecting people's property and rights.
Of course, the governments could start by getting their own houses in order, like the Inland Revenue in the UK who don't support Mozilla browsers. If government insisted on Open Office document format for contracts etc, a lot more companies would at least try Open Office out.
1. People not knowing what each other is up to. So someone builds a reusable module, but no-one knows about it.
2. People not working through the impact of changes in one part of a system on another. How do I find out all the places that a particularly column on a database table can be updated? How do I find out what it is set to? OK. This can be done, but it's very long winded.
3. Fragmentation of tools. As an ex-mainframe guy, we had COBOL and JCL. Now, people download pieces of software, build things in different tools. All these tools require training, which takes time to become mature in them (and often are discarded before maturity occurs).
4. Specs and code don't match. We should be at a point by now that this isn't an issue. The spec should be the code and the tool should run from the spec.
I've read this and can see nothing that states how you get from current position to a software factory. All I can see is "this doesn't work" and "this would be good", but nothing about how you organise it or anything.
What's difficult about software is the impact of a change on the rest of the system. That's what a lot of people don't understand.
I guess it must have been interesting being involved in a project involving an emotionless robot snooker player. Did you keep in touch with Steve afterwards? ;)
(to be fair, the bloke's got a sparkling wit and milked the "interesting" part).
Schools are there to prepare children for the adult world. Mostly, they fail to do so.
When kids are also taught about laws on corporate monopolies, human rights legislation and barratry, I'll support this.
When the whole "millions of lines of code" thing is buried (when SCO collapse), the next time someone comes up with a dubious IP claim, there will be thousands of people saying "what, like SCO?".
You know what, my OpenOffice attachments don't open when I send them to word users. What a piece of junk Word is. And in Microsoft's case, they could support it as OpenOffice uses an open standard for documents, unlike Word which is closed or cost-licensed. For the zillionth time, THAT'S WHY OPEN OFFICE CAN'T READ .DOC, not because they don't want to.
Firefox doesn't render pages "properly" because those pages aren't produced "properly". They've stepped outside the standards. Does IE render pages with transparent PNGs properly? Nope.
You are right about one thing. Firefox isn't near the level of IE. It's way above it. Have you ever actually seen or used it?
Personally I don't use sites that don't render properly or tell me that I have to use it with IE.
I'd like to know what you can't seem to make Firefox do that you can make IE do (with exceptions like ActiveX controls).
So how about we tell Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Borders et al that they can stop selling this book, or we stop buying lots of nice pricey tech books?
Let the big guys then fight each other over it.
There's a place for these accusations - a courtroom. When SCO take this to court, I'll start listening.
If you are thinking of the old 16K Ram Pack on the ZX81, then the number of these would be 64,000. They were unstable enough with 1. If each was about 2 inches high, that would be about 10,000ft tall!
On that price basis, I worked out that 1GB of memory would have cost me over 1 million dollars at the time.
Old media used to have barriers to entry. You needed distribution networks for newspapers, or the huge expenditure for TV. The net costs little.
I've heard a lot of people say things like "but how will make any money out of it". And you know what? It's the wrong question.
Just because a business has existed to provide something doesn't mean that there's a place for that business anymore, or that it can't move from large scale to small scale.
Also, the choice is much larger. My newsagent has a maximum of something like 500 news sources. The net has thousands and thousands.
I've met people who really, really wanted to own a BMW. They know that a ferrari is off the scale, but a BMW is a symbol of reaching a club above where they are, in other words that they have exceeded their own expectations.
The statement I made about brands wasn't my assertion, but something I heard in a report years ago.
In fact, the response to saying "I'll have to check it over with my lawyer" speaks volumes.