Hi Paul: On Thursday 31 May 2001 10:08, you wrote:
The sad truth is that MS Office, and Word in particular, has become a de facto standard in much of big business and government, both in the USA and (it appears) in other countries such as Great Britain. Documents get exchanged in that format, and if you don't have the latest version (soon to be XP) you can't work with them. The behavior is self-reinforcing.
The *really* sad truth is that Microsoft never really had any competition. Apple suffered from not being able to get Motorola chips, because of a lawsuit. They wouldn't allow their computers to be built by third party vendors, thus limiting there dissemination. Finally Apple got hijacked by a Pepsi Cola salesman who ran the company into the ground. I can't really say why OS/2 didn't make it. But the UNIX distros, (Linux, FreeBSD and presumably MacOSX) are in a different league all together. Consider this: 1) China, the nation collectively, won't pay for software licensing. I belive they just ignore the single machine install restriction. If XP is not capable of pirating, they will just not use it. China, I believe, has it's own Linux distro called Red Flag. 2) India is moving toward widespread use of Linux. 3) All the claptrap about the Linux desktop being dead is just nonsense. First of all the GNOME and KDE desktops are beta. That's how open source works, release often, release early. So the judgments about the Linux desktop are being formed on, as yet, unfinished software. I am running KDE 2.2 Alpha 2. You know this desktop is Alpha in name only! For being prerelease software it runs damn good. Question: How come the Linux desktop is pronounced dead when KDE 2 is nearing perfection and GNOME is not far behind? Why did they not say the Linux desktop was a fruitless quest when we ran KDE 1.1 and GNOME used Enlightenment. Now that GNOME and KDE are making significant progress there are all these articles on how the desktop is dead. I'll tell you why those articles are there; somebody stands to lose a whole lot of money. You know it's funny Mr. Gates calls one of his products hailstorm because in reality Linux is like a bad hailstorm for M$. They can't run from it, they can't hide from it and they can't make it stop. BTW some more editors for Linux: http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/ http://cooledit.org
Star Office isn't a solution, and won't be until and unless it is able to both import and export the most recent MS formats. I wish that would happen, but I don't expect it to.
Please don't get me wrong. I lament this state of affairs as much as anyone here. The only solution I can see is a new antitrust action that would force Microsoft to publish its data formats for all Office products 90 days before releasing any new ones and would explicitly permit anyone else to use them.
Cheers, Jonathan