[plug] [OT] Welcome to windows-sucks.com

[Craig Foster]

****** Warning - opinions follow...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Knight [mailto:anarchist_tomato at hotmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 12:43 AM
> To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
> Subject: Re: [plug] [OT] Welcome to windows-sucks.com

> Unless you seriously want to keep this on list, don't reply
> to this, unless
> it's off list.
> Anyway, this is just a viewpoint of mine, but if m$ claim
> to have a market
> lead due to innovation, make them PROVE it! They should
> still be able to
> produce products like Office etc, but make them adhere to
> an open format,
> like maybe Word would save its files in W3C compliant HTML.

Frontpage produces files in HTML - would you call it innovative purely for
that reason? HTML is not the be-all and end-all of document formats. RTF
is *THE STANDARD* for wordprocessors, and funnily enough, it's what I send
people when they ask for "Word Documents only". Word 2000 will even save
"Word 95 (*.doc)" as RTF as the import/export team stuffed up. And it
doesn't save with editing changes :)

Innovation is about offering features or methods not used before. It's not
about what format the files are in. Honestly, they innovated
wordprocessing quite a bit until Word 97. Auto spell-checking (if only
their e-mail did that too! :P ), the key combinations they chose, ease of
use for almost absolute beginners, etc are all good things. Lastly, they
pump it into secretarial and educational institutions to 'corrupt em while
they're young' forming a standard 'by default' - much as Apple tried to do
years ago.

These are the main reasons people keep coming back to Word for
wordprocessing. The main problems I see, is that their standards always
change (Word 95 -> 97 -> 2000 -> XP), and the standard they chose is too
adhoc and patched together for reliable document recovery. You can tell it
was written in C as even the documents use pointers!

And that's just Word. Excel has different reasons. Access and Powerpoint
are just way to easy for marketing type to play with, so they're
inherently bad :)

The industry is a little more complex than open vs closed. Oh, that and
they have mouths to feed.

Opinion over.

> This way, the market would be even in terms of goals and m$
> would be forced
> to produce a successful product through innovation alone.
> Just an idea, I
> hope some people agree.
>
> anarchist tomato

In the interest of open and intelligent discussion...

Regards.

Craig F.
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