The War Of The Word 511
atari_kid writes "For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees. And even some of their high level managers have their own blog like Chris Pratley, a group program manager (GPM) for Word2002 (OfficeXP) project. Mr. Pratley just blogged on his 'personal philosophical' conversion from a Mac geek to a Microsoft devotee & his interesting perspective on the 'Word Processor' wars of the mid-90's and why Microsoft won."
Microsoft's most valuable soldier in Word Wars (Score:3, Funny)
Bob is a close runner-up.
What the hell.... (Score:3, Funny)
Cue the Clippy joke! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue the Clippy joke! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft's most valuable soldier in Word Wars (Score:5, Insightful)
Much as I dislike alot of microsoft stuff, this is just over the top. There are two software areas that microsoft does fairly well - Office apps and RAD development (as opposed to high end server development enviroments).
My biggest gripe with microsoft is the abuse of monopoly powers - the fact that you cant for love nor money get office for linux (except via third party stuff like Wine projects). Thats abuse of a monopoly position of operating systems.
Office is, however, a reasonable suite. Its not the best at everything by any means, but you would be an idiot to suggest its the worst. In fact, some of the user interface stuff in office was genuinely innovative - like the background spell check with squiggly lines under misspelt words. Word 95 was the first to do this from memory, and certainly the first major word processor that could.
The killer app that microsoft makes is not windows, its office. And its with a good reason - its actually very good software. The number of people who run it under wine on linux or on OSX is a strong statement of its quality. If its an undocumented standard for file formats, well, thats because storing documents in HTML and then XML came way later than microsoft's office suite. It doesn't mean that its time to move to better standards for document storage, but at the time microsoft developed this software (Ie., in the days of word 3.0 onwards) pretty much nobody stored documents in XML (for space reasons alone - Hard drive capacities of 20-40 Megabytes were common).
Just my 2c worth, will be considered flamebait by some no doubt.
Michael
Get used to disappointment (Score:5, Funny)
It's always good to have high hopes, but in this case I'm afraid you'll have to get used to disappointment. Here we come!
Re:Get used to disappointment (Score:5, Insightful)
The Old New Thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Old New Thing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Old New Thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? Ok, I read a good bit of his blog for the current month, and looked at the titles for March, and I have found absolutely nothing to link his blog to what you said.
That is, I don't get it. What are you talking about?
Re:The Old New Thing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The Old New Thing (Score:3, Insightful)
It's Okay (Score:5, Funny)
Digging his own grave? (Score:5, Insightful)
He admired Apple for its elegance and derided MS for its substandard products; he was rejected by Apple, but offered a job at MS.
Ouch.
It should be said that later, he comes to terms with MS not necessarily on the grounds that they make good product, but that they are a good business. Funny, that.
OSS (Score:4, Insightful)
Kinda like how we come to terms with OSS not necessarily on the grounds that it makes good product, but that it's an idealistic philosophy. Funny that.
Re:Digging his own grave? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonetheless, what MS did is something that, essentially, would not have been nearly so illegal had it not been so successful; many who are not MS apologists might still admit that others who have been wronged by Microsoft have done just the same thing--Apple, RealNetworks, and Netscape. Never is this justification for illegal activities, but it should be noted, too, that what Microsoft did--the strictly illegal parts--were s
It's over, so soon? (Score:3, Funny)
Guess we better let OpenOffice.org [openoffice.org] and Star Office [singerscreations.com] know right away!
Re:It's over, so soon? (Score:4, Insightful)
They have also won the browser war, yes, alternatives exist, however the majority of web users still use IE.
Just because a war is over and is won doesn't mean that there is no more room for fighting. Just look at what's still going on in Iraq.
Re:It's over, so soon? (Score:3, Informative)
2. Star got killed in the market.
3. After buying Star Sun gave up on turning StarOffice into a profitable product, instead releasing it under a free softare license. This goes against a trend set with Solaris and Java, so it's plain they saw no hope of competing with Microsoft at their own game.
Yes, Microsoft won the proprietary word processor market. They're the best at that game.
OpenOffice.org, take note: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's over, so soon? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, to sum up what you just said:
You switched back to Office because that's what you wanted in the first place?
You just "evaluated" Open Office based on the fact that you wanted to use Microsoft Office all along.... that's just wierd. It's not a load of frustration, you guys just weren't smart enough to evaluate your needs before you decided on your tool, that's all. You can't blame OOo for the fact that it's not Office. That's like blaming a Lincoln Continental for not being a Corvette. You can't just co
Re:It's over, so soon? (Score:3, Insightful)
Congratulations. You are now vendor locked. You may no longer choose to use other products that may have better/different features or cost less.
Have nice day and please continue to deposit money into our accounts on a regular basis.
Thank you
Management at MS.
Tech support (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tech support (Score:4, Insightful)
IIRC so did M$. I remember calling M$ tech support a couple of times (actually never to actually get tech support though, I was in MIS and I was curious about their MIS system, which ran on Vaxen at the time).
Re:Tech support (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows. (Score:5, Insightful)
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS is still the best CUI based word processing program ever made. But they completely fucked themselves over with Windows.
WordPerfect Corp. lived in denial, claiming that their loyal customers would stick with them in the DOS world and not migrate to Windows. They didn't even think about making a Windows version until MS Word was eating their testicles.
Now look what you've gone and done (Score:5, Funny)
That's the problem with blogs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Next thing you know, Ken Lay and Dick Cheney will have a blog about how their hearts are breaking for the poor unemployed, oppressed everyday Joe... and people will buy it because hey, it's on a blog.
I call fake blog (Score:4, Insightful)
$5 says this "blog" is another such flake.
Re:I call fake blog (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember the Windows "switcher" fiasco with fondness. IIRC, what got them busted was using public-domain clip-art photos as the people who supposedly switched. People were like, "hey, wasn't she just telling me to refinance my mortgage in a pop-up add last week?"
Re:I call fake blog (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's the problem with blogs... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want some good examples... consider how the mainstream media, including "reputable" sources like New York Times, were printing story a
Re:That's the problem with blogs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Give me an example where the New York Times stated that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I don't think you understand how journalism works, or can work. Journalists frequently report statements by experts or interested parties. They try to accurately
Re:Save the children, please. (Score:3, Insightful)
$300K. Wow. Thats an astounding chunk of change. Let's see now, the LA Unified School District's 2003 budget [k12.ca.us] was $403 million dollars (out of just under $5 billion in revenue), while Microsoft's total revenue figures for the same year [microsoft.com] were $32 billion dollars.
Even ignoring (for your argument's sake) that it's legal to pirate and steal commercial software, and even assuming that the school district indeed paid $5M (which is not true [bsa.org]), $300K is equal to
Fuck Me (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Fsck Me (Score:4, Funny)
WP 5.1 - those were the days (Score:5, Interesting)
I still keep Word Perfect 5.1 on my 386-SX based Toshiba notebook. Notebook and word processor run just fine, and to this day would meet 99% of my needs if I didn't have to exchange documents with others (meaning they send me MSWord files).
I remember when WP succeeded because they supported a wide variety of hardware, and most every printer in existence -- unlike anyone else at the time.
And when they failed by not forseeing the quick move to MSWindows 3.0 and above.
Those were the days. What days? The days when there was still compeition in our industry.
Re:WP 5.1 - those were the days (Score:3, Funny)
Oxymoron detected.
Re:WP 5.1 - those were the days (Score:5, Insightful)
WordPerfect Corporation vs Microsoft Corporation
1) WP - promote senior assembly programmers as the new Windows programmers, MS - hire new graduates and put them to work under former assembly programmers.
2) WP - lights out at 5pm, MS - burn the midnight oil.
3) WP - bet the farm on OS/2, MS - bet the farm on Windows while paying lip service to OS/2.
4) WP - try to compete with traditional strengths, MS - Work with IBM to create a CUA, then change the CUA once everyone else adopts it.
5) WP - hated MS so much that they used Borland OWL, MS - made the compiler, made the dlls and APIs, didn't tell anyone about it if they could have an advantage for awhile.
6) WP - had incompetent management promoted from within including rampant nepotism, MS - hired management from outside, promoted from within when it identified talent.
The list goes on and on...
Interpretation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse my tinfoil hat, but wasn't that about the time that Windows finally stopped sucking utterly, and became a tool that everyone, including PHBs, could use? Isn't this the era of PC Magazine, and John Dvorak, and everyone's grandmother getting a PC?
Word was never technically superior, it merely appealed to a broader (and simpler) audience. There is a difference. Word won because it got reviews from trade rags. Word won due to a cultural shift - where document presentation became more important than its content, where a document's formatting is more important than its timely production. Word is the Guardent [guardent.com] of word processors.
In answer to the folks who claim WP was a lousy product, I have two words: Reveal Codes.
I only jumped to Word97 from PC Word 5, then only because it was a 32bit app. By then, WP was dead and buried. I made the jump to Word2000 at work, then to OOo, which I use under the radar to publish all of my documents, typically via PDF.
Re:Interpretation? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's important to remember that businesses used to run on personal secretaries and typing pools. WordPerfect had an "expert" blank-screen UI that appealed to these users. They could remember Ctrl+F7 (rather than a printer icon) because they really had few other professional responsibilities. Knowing the WP command set warranted a significantly higher pay for secretaries in those days.
The shift to GUI PCs and MS Word allowed companies to force their PHBs to type their own memos. They then could dismiss/reassign most of the admin staff for considerable cost savings. This wasn't so much a "cultural shift" but a matter of pure $$$.
Re:Interpretation? (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet as Tom De Marco in his excellent book "Slack" points out... what this means is PHBs (myself included) now spend huge amounts of time writing documents that previously we would have dictated to assistants and worrying about formating that they would have sorted for us.
The average sec gets what... $20,000 ? The average senior exec gets $100,000+... and if 25% of their time is in things that a sec could do.
Is it a real cost saving or has a perceived cost saving actually cost us more.
I propose going back to troff, perfect formating, perfect control....
And no sodding powerpoint
Re:Interpretation? (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect the "cultural shift" was more along the lines of:
+ Gender equity made harder to hire for subordinate secretarial jobs
+ Computerization made it more expensive to hire trained people
+ A trend towards "knowledge workers" -- so you get a bunch of Marketing Assistants rather than typists.
Also
Re:Interpretation? (Score:4, Insightful)
two words: Reveal Codes
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I always have my Word set up to show all hidden characters but it still doesn't show all codes.
I use it mostly for amusement to look at the documents that I receive from other people and see the inane and repetitious page formatting marks that they set, unset, reset, and move. It gives me a sense of how much extra trouble everyone else has constructing a document when their problems could be solved if they would plan their page formatting ahead of time.
Re:Interpretation? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Interpretation? (Score:5, Insightful)
WP *and* Word were/are the wrong tool for that job.
Re:REVEAL CODES!! (Score:3, Informative)
Obviously you've never used Wordperfect or you would realize that it has far superior code markup viewing. Word perfect codes are similar to HTML markup to a certain extent: they have a start and end tag and can be deleted and moved as well. It is very easy to figure out a formatting problem by just looking at the codes.
Apparently Word's Grammar Checker... (Score:2, Funny)
...isn't used.
For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees.
Eh now?
Reverse Engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
OEMs preinstalling Office (Score:5, Insightful)
the abbreviated version (Score:5, Funny)
1. Microsoft bloggers are very enthusiatic about Microsoft.
2. If you get turned down for a job at Apple you might not like the computers so much any more.
3. Asian versions of software are complicated.
4. Microsoft puts out crappy products at first and then listens to customers to improve them.
5. Other companies make mistakes and Microsoft almost always takes advantage of the situation.
6. Having a huge monopoly in operating systems and file formats gives Bill Gates a huge erection. I swear you can see it during meetings.
(Okay I made up that last one.)
Too ironic (Score:5, Interesting)
The Word planning team discovered that the WordPerfect sales force was going around to customers and showing Word opening a complex WordPerfect file (printer.tst) to show how bad the conversion was, and therefore how pointless it would be to try to switch to Word. So the Word team organized a special dev team that focused entirely on WordPerfect document import, "reverse-engineering" the WordPerfect file format (documentation for which was jealously guarded, as was the norm back then).
And of course Microsoft now uses open file formats, which mean that OpenOffice can seamlessly open Word files. Microsoft would certainly never try to keep people using its products by suggesting that other products would be unable to open its files. It's features and price that sell product today, boys and girls!
Re:Too ironic - Definitely Irony +2 (Score:3, Insightful)
MS's blogging (Score:2)
Re:MS's blogging (Score:5, Insightful)
Excellent question. Maybe I've got my tinfoil hat on too tight, but I wouldn't put it past Microsoft's management to have a plan akin to this: "Hey, go out and make Microsoft look good. Speak as individuals. Tell the world that we're really NOT the Evil Empire."
Microsoft has tried to manipulate public opinion [informationweek.com] of them before. Maybe they're just getting more subtle. When the big money doesn't work, go soft-touch.
Grow a pair! (Score:5, Funny)
Puh-leeze, Chris, you manage a flagship product for one of the richest monopolists in the country, one that has de facto control of the IT market, and you're afraid of emails from 13-year-old kids?
Try to at least ACT like a man.
Chris Pratley (Score:5, Insightful)
I rather like Microsoft's newfound interest in what they call "transparancy." I think that the blogging trend inside MS is a good thing-- it is surprising how little the company curtails the content on their employee's blogs.
--- JRJ
Re:Chris Pratley (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Chris Pratley (Score:4, Funny)
Since this is Microsoft we're talking about, shouldn't the more appropriate word be glasnost ?
Re:Chris Pratley (Score:5, Informative)
Policy: "Notices to employees: don't take pictures of the campus and post them for public viewing without permission from the management or you'll get fired because it's a security concern."
Employee:
Microsoft:
Slashbots:
MO-Rons.
Interesting Stuff Comes Out Late (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure more than a few of the bright employees at MS have some stories waiting to be told. OTOH, they're probably still grateful for the stock option wealth of the last 2 decades and feel some loyalty to the company that has done both good and bad.
Maybe Bob Woodward ought to interview some of them....
That's it (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, to put it another way: version 1 sucks, version 2 sucks, they keep pushing on, version 3 isn't bad, 4 is better, 5 is pretty good, 6 is excellent. Of course, at that point they've improved as much as they can, things start getting clunkier and the Linux knockoff has reached the quality of version 4.
But it's a better plan than a) making something good, systematically ruining it and then suing Microsoft or b) making something that sucks, freaking out and making something else that sucks and then suing Microsoft, the two primary approaches of their competition.
Re:That's it -- version 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
And at Version 7 we change the entire file structure to demolish the compeition and force a new upgrade cycle, after seeding the CIO with a free copy.
You'd better bet the whole company will upgrade after said CIO finds out no one else in the company can open his memos saved in the new default format.
You lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but try as I may, you completely lost me after that comment.
Short sighted design gives M$ a bad name among developers - and by people who use computers more than the "average consumer", like say: at work.
Microsoft: Bottom line - push product - get money.
There's nothing "pure" what-so-ever about this statement. You may as well be writing about how you learned to appreciate McDonalds.
Re:You lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's method: Design a product usable by the maximum amount of people that has enough functionality to keep most people using it.
Better than: design the perfect feature-laden product which will be impossible for 90% of people to learn.
Remember microsoft gets paid per unit sold, regardless of how much you use the software.
net thugs? (Score:5, Funny)
does that word mean what I think it means? .
.
.
S-L-A-S-H-D-O-T?
Re:net thugs? (Score:5, Funny)
That would also be an apt description of the Msft marketing dept.
Quickly over quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't read the whole thing, but I wanted to comment on this. His argument makes sense for a certain amount of time, but that time may come to a halt quickly. Microsoft's core business units (Windows and Office) are quickly becoming commodity prices. The efforts of Linux and OpenOffice are, in most respects, equaling the features found in Microsoft products. At the same time, the number any new features added often just bloat the product. When this happens, you have to start competing on quality.
Linux does this as an OS in the server room. However, as a mainstream desktop, Linux lacks in the quality department (ease of use, interface consistency). However, Windows isn't the greatest at these things either and open source should see a huge hole for stealing market share if people get behind efforts to improve the quality (UI, etc.) of the desktop product.
Apple has demonstrated the validity of the quality thinking, unfortunately they seem content to remain a niche market player. I really respect Apple for this, but would love to see Linux take a page from their quality book and read it to the mainstream.
As much as it pains me (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this, despite what the slashdot techy/programmer crowd may think, is spot on. MS has a reputation for rushing stuff out the door and for selling borken software, but the fact is that most of their stuff was "good enough" where it counted. Then over time they hack away and hack away until they mostly get it right. Other software companies could learn for them on this strategy although perhaps things are a bit different today.
Re:As much as it pains me (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying that Microsoft was wrong or they were using a bad business model. They made some very good strategic decisions. But IMHO the business model only worked so well because they are Microsoft.
Re:As much as it pains me (Score:3, Insightful)
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And of course it helps if they also make a strategic error because they are under so much pressure.
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To this:
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Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer
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And it all makes perfect sense.
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but the fact is that most of their stuff was "good enough" where it counted
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Take for example the rush to beat OS/2 to market. "Good enough" was, at that time, any GUI OS that would b
This is cute! (Score:5, Insightful)
How about remember when EULA's didn't prohibit benchmarking under threat of well-funded legal assault?
Yes, I remember when good vendors were proud to show the world what their products could do.
How about it, Chris? We all know you're reading /. today to see how your blog is being received. You're in the inside. How about doing your part to open up benchmarking of all MS products again?
Head Hunter Fodder (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were still in that business I would be mining those in company blogs for the best talent. If I were Microsoft I would make those strictly available for internal use only.
True, it would be difficult to romance someone away from the biggest "bestest"; however, many of us have been trapped under an evil middle management boss at one time or another and would be willing to defect.
Word is The Winner (Score:3, Insightful)
But I gotta note that Word drives me up the g.d. fscking wall with its habit of altering formats for no apparent reason. Indentions, fonts, everything just changes at random because I press spacebar, enter, backspace or delete. Sometimes half a page of prior paragraphs will change because I pressed a button while editing an entirely different paragraph.
The damn bloody thing does not behave. I could get better cooperation from a two-year-old child. Don't you tell me I must be doing something wrong, or that I must need to get an upgrade. Bah. It's been this way for years.
MacWrite never acted like this. StarOffice neither. This has nothing to do with Linux Zealotry or Open Source Fantacism - I could care less about any of that.
Yes, Microsoft is the winner: When it comes to pure teeth-splintering, hair-shredding frustration, Microsoft, congratulations, you've got 'em all beat, and you probably always will.
Bastards.
Re:Word is The Winner (Score:3, Insightful)
The real reason Word "won": (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone remember Sprint by Borland? Of course you don't.
It's also the reason Access took over and not Paradox.
oh... It had more than a little to do with why no one uses Quattro by Borland also.
Borland's first line of Windows versions of their software had to be developed with VERY little knowledge of the Windows API.
It's funny that he doesn't mention any of the lawsuit wars that went on between MS and Borland when Windows first came out.
They sued Borland over having drop-down menus in their products... and won.
So what changed regarding backwards readability? (Score:3, Interesting)
So what changed? Word of today does not open WordPerfect files -- hell, it doesn't even open Microsoft Works files! He seems to understand that this is a huge deal to users, but the modern Word program ignores this basic need.
For instance, I teach a class online [umuc.edu]. Part of the requirement is that students submit papers throughout the semester. Being an open minded and computer literate kinda guy, my syllabus allowed students to submit papers in any common file format.... Only to find that Word XP garbles anything that's not Word -- even other Microsoft products! Unbelievable. Fortunately, I have access to WP and OfficeStar -- but even then, opening Works files was nigh impossible until I found that one of my old laptops came pre-installed with it.
So I guess I just don't get it -- he understands the issue but ignores the solution. A perfect example of why Word is the choice we live with rather then the choice we desire.
Please... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like MS would rather have a half-baked product now than a great one later (or maybe ever). Nice. It does totally ring with the sense of their products in my experience, be they Mac or WIn platforms. They have to understand that they see things from the perspective of those who have been working with incremental versions of their stuff for so long - and you get this sense from the minutia in the blog - that they have no sense of an outsider, pulling up to a computer that they just unwrapped, and trying to get some plain old writing done by using Word. It's like being dropped into the cockpit of a plane and being told to drive. It does dozens of non-intuitive things before you even get to the annoying parts, and it's ALL design. They know this. Every so often that ship something that makes good design sense and does breakthru stuff - but mostly their work is fraught with details that get in the way rather than accellerate your work.
A bit more history (Score:5, Informative)
What made Windows 3.1 successful was really two things, neither of which really involved the gee-whiz-bang GUI interface:
1: Since printer drivers were now part of the standard operating system, once a printer driver existed for Win3x, it worked for every program in Win3x. This was a huge improvement over getting the proper printer driver for your particular program.
2: At Win3.1, True Type scalable fonts were integrated into the operating system, which meant they now worked with every Win3.1 compatable program. Hard for many people to remember -- or even imagine -- days before scalable fonts were common everywhere as they are now.
The was also better memory management for extended memory.
But those two items alone are really the big deal of Win3.0/3.1 -- and they are a big deal.
Very good article (Score:5, Insightful)
Half of software is marketing; half is engineering. Too bad some people still haven't realized it....
Sivaram Velauthapillai
"internal" blogging service (Score:3, Funny)
!!!!
Interesting, but what about the paranoid ranting? (Score:4, Insightful)
With respect, there are certainly plenty of lower-than-the-common-denominator internet users willing to throw an egg for no particularly good reason, but this writer is strikingly dishonest in his defense of his employer.
Microsoft is a monopolist who has profited tremendously from shipping user-antaganostic code under cover of standards-lock-in. This is hardly an "outrageous" accusation; rather, it's been established in the courts, but far more, it's common knowledge and indeed, a running joke.
The company's story is interesting because, when they see their monopoly threatened, they are capable of rising to the occasion and doing good work. But they are a classic victim of their success, indeed, at many times a classic monopolist, and they often have acted it. When there was no incentive for them to do a good job, they did a terrible one, smirking all the way to the bank.
And they are crystal clear in their mission - not to "provide better products faster" or whatever the PR materials say this week, but to enrich themselves. And if there is a choice between enriching themselves and providing better software faster, they make the "right" choice every time. But should Chris suggest I am a "thug" for saying so, I hope he will include the U.S. Department of Justice - who advanced the same idea, and prevailed in court.
Chris wants to breathlessly paint his company's critics with the straw-man tar brush - as he does so, he is being dishonest.
I did find his writing on his work to be fascinating, and I'd say he expresses himself well, and it's no surprise he's found the success he has within the company. But he curiously glosses over the role that OEM bundling played in the success of the Office franchise.
You see, as Microsoft sat on the backs of the computer manufacturers and twisted arms, it had an excellent position to "entice" bundling deals that would choke off a 3rd party software market like, say, office softawre, by making sure that their own products were conveniently already included on new computers for a reasonable price.
This is hardly as clear cut as what they did to control the browser or media player landscape, but does anyone (outside of a Microsoft manager with a certain proprietary interest in it being more about his own skill) have the audacity to suggest Word won the format war purely on its merits?
DMCA (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmm. If the DMCA was in effect in that time, was this legal to do???
Infered tactics (Score:5, Interesting)
Key points are:
I'll tell you why WP lost (Score:3, Insightful)
Also contrary to this guys take it was NEVER about quality. If it was Word Perfect would have won out.
btw I'd still rather use WP 6.1 over any version of Word even today. Word is infuriating to work with as it constantly has to do things "its way". I just recently was updating my resume which hasn't been touched in years and the act of just adding a simple bullet point in line with the others made me want to smash my head into my monitor.
We can learn from this blog (Score:3, Interesting)
One specific feature he mentioned as a must-have for the Japanese market, the ability to have a line of text running vertically in a table cell, is still not available in OpenOffice AFAIK.
Reducing signal-to-noise (Score:3, Interesting)
The same thing is done to fight back against the currently very efficient way for consumers to communicate, and share opinions and information about products, companies, etc.. As more and more companies catch on, the signal will increasingly be drowned out by the "marketing" noise, use of the same communication methods for advertising purposes. It happens with every new space; you just have to stay ahead of the curve.
Marketing - n. Hijacking trusted forms of communication.
it's not about quality (Score:3, Insightful)
First, it is naive to think that there is a single "best" piece of software for everybody. Is there a single "best" car? A single "best" phone company? A single "best" suit of clothes? A single best food? They tried the one-size-fits-all in the planned economies of Russia and China, and you know how well that worked. It seems naive to think that there is any single word processor that works well for 90% of the people.
Second, the quality differences are irrelevant to most people. Lotus Smartsuite, StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc. were almost certainly all good enough for at least 90% of all users. But the fact is that no amount of lowering the prices of those other products made them competitive.
Today, people buy Microsoft Word even though they can get OpenOffice for free. Why? It's not because Microsoft Word has more buttons or more features, it is because the only way people can be sure that they can read Microsoft Word documents is by buying Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word may also happen to be a well-engineered word processor, but the need to read Word's proprietary format was the thing that assured Microsoft Word adoption half a dozen years ago, and it still is.
type 11 error? (Score:3, Funny)
History Repeating. (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder which company is jealously guarding their file formats now... I wonder how MS Word would have grown if the DMCA existed then.
Re:He missed one point (Score:5, Funny)
So, do you have to print those out as flipbooks or what?
Printing out Quicktime videos (Score:3, Funny)
At ~ 30 frames per second, you could print out a 20 minute video on a mere 36,000 sheets of paper.
Re:He missed one point (Score:3, Insightful)
When was the last time you jammed a Quicktime into your TPS cover sheet?
Re: (Score:2)
That's practically a selling point. (Score:5, Insightful)
Until printers can print animated printouts, I'll be happy with word processor programs that don't embed movies or music in documents. (in fact, after the fiasco of Clippy, I don't want ANYTHING animated in the presence of my word processor documents!)
Re:He missed one point -- Yeah Like (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, like I do that every day.
Re:Lie of Omission? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please.
Evidence (Score:4, Informative)
Excerpt:
Except... (Score:4, Insightful)
We know there were undocumented Windows APIs. That wasn't the question.
Re:Ann Coulter has got it right (Score:3, Informative)
That's funny, I didn't know we had a 'god given' right to sodomy. I though Americans simply had the right to keep crazy right wing religious nuts out of our bedrooms and out of our lives if we so choose.
If Ann Coulter has got "it" right, whatever your "it" was.. it's too bad she hasn't got anything else right. You should R