On Monday 29 January 2001 13:19, Fred A. Miller wrote:
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2679248,00.ht ml
I read it. Dave Coursey, the Exec Editor, is actually floating a subscription trial baloon for Microsoft, and in doing so is being nothing more than a psychophant, helping M$ in their quest to determine the maximum amount of squeeze they can apply to a devoted Office user. I read most of the responses. Some were obvious Penquinistas, but most appeared to be Office users and without exception all were negative to the idea. Most said they would choose another product. Some offered their ideas as to how M$ would do it - Sell the base product (with built in time bomb) and rent the 'upgrades', which would deactive the time bomb for another year. None mentioned the possibility that M$ would be charging rent for all of the components of Office, not the whole package. Also, no one seemed to consider that their "rental fees' for several M$ products could become very substantial. A couple encouraged M$ to go to subscriptions, suggesting it would begin the mass migration to LInux. I think M$ sees a window of opportunity to hook folks into the subscription model, by way of data trapping (I can't switch because all my data is in formats that can't be switched to other products), before KOffice and StarOffice become equal to or better than Office on most fronts. That point is probably with a year. I think many will be surprised to know how useful SO5.2 *already* is on the Linux OS, and KOffice is not far behind. JLK -- Scientific theories, according to Sir Karl Popper, can be "falsified," or proven wrong, by experiment. Unscientific theories -Marxist dialectical history and Freudian psychology were Popper's favorites- are formed in such a way that they cannot be falsified by data.