Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 20:31 -0400, Sam Clemens wrote:
That's mostly due to M$ bundling Word with new machines to drive WP out of the market (making Word *appear* to be free, whereas WP would cost extra.)
The whole purpose of this, of course, was to eliminate a very popular cross-platform application, thereby driving everyone into Windows whether they wanted to be there or not.
Devil's advocate here:
I wonder what a pay-for-it software company thinks of Linux distros including 'free' apps automatically? It must do to them what MS did to
Who cares? It means that if they want people to pay for their software, it will take something more than the standard bug-ware which has become standard within so much of the industry. Back in the 1980's most software companies would have been absolutely aghast at the concept of daring to charge money for software with so many horrendous, glaring bugs and crashes as is typical in modern software. It's quite pathetic. So, seriously, I don't care what they think.
WP and others.
Years ago, IBM was every bit as much of a bullying criminal enterprise in this industry as MS is now. [And Gates has absolutely no excuse for most of Microsoft's behavior, because the precedents for these practices being illegal were set by IBM's string of losses on charges filed by the DOJ, and most of all William Gates, Jr. (Billy's father) WAS A CORPORATE LAWYER AT IBM. So I find his string of protestations that he's not doing anything wrong to be so much dishonest bullshit.] Anyways, IBM hired some guy Gestetner, who really turned the IBM corporate culture around...from one which really pioneered the FUD and vendor lock-in techniques which are so infamously abused by MS today...to the good citizen corporation which we see today. Read Thomas Watson Jr.'s autobiography. Even before they were dragged into court, and convicted, people at IBM new they were doing wrong -- salesmen, for lack of a better term.. "cockblocked" sales from competing vendors, by claiming that whatever product the customer was about to buy from whoever, that IBM had a similar product in testing "right now" and would be released shortly.... and then sending the message back to engineering to get cracking and come up with SOMETHING so that the sales force wouldn't be exposed for the bald faced liars that they were. TW Jr. knew about it, and in fact, it was company policy to sell the client on the vaporware hardware, for no other reason than to starve the competition of income. His excuses in federal court were just as lame as Gates' excuses have been in these same courts.
If MS was smart, they would make a Linux version of Word that must be purchased just so they could take Linux distros to court for including things like OO. Make Linux distros stop including all this free software that is locking folk into Linux. :)
Fortunately, MS is contractually prohibited from selling any Unix or Unix-like OS. It has something to do with when they sold off Xenix. And at this point, for them to market a *nix-like OS would completely remove all airs of legitimacy from Windows as anything other than an overpriced platform for playing video games. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org