See my remarks below, plz. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike Ford <mikeford(a)socal.rr.comTo: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.orgSent: Sunday, May 07, 2000 4:43 AM Subject: Re: I wrote 'Nuke Redmond' products There's nothing illegal, immoral, or fattening about these. Perhaps there should be limits, but there aren't, hence everybody (except MS) can do it with no fear of legal recourse. Incompatibilities of what sort? Isn't that simply a business decision? Have you and examples? That CERTAINLY is a valid business/marketing decision. MS isn't alone in pursuing this practice. That's one of the risks a magazine editor has to take into consideration in making the decision to publish an item or not. It's just like advertising the fact that Wal-Mart jeans are built by Chinese prisoners, or that certain lines of clothing carried by J.C. Penney are made in sweatshops. line. this Oh, there's a lot being said, but little of it's true or relevant. What's more, the legal beagles aren't "up" enough on what the concepts and verbage they're tossing around means. Well, we may get to see whether the courts come up with a prudent and reasonable solution. The obvious solution to break up MS won't help, but it will serve to octuple the cost of both software and hardware. It will set back the industry a decade as it tries to find a substitute for MS in a market where really only one OS and Office automation suite is going to be effective. If you don't see that through your haze of rage at Microsoft for doing something you weren't smart enough or diligent enough to do yourself, then perhaps you can come up with a potential successor OS to WIndows. Remember, though, that if MS simply closed its doors tomorrow, it wouldn't harm MS as much as it would harm the end user. What I'd look for is a small company with fewer than a dozen employees, since more employees would make the company to ponderous and intert to keep up, to invent a non-Windows OS with a GUI that won't get them sued, and integrate their own office automation software with that. Once that's done, they should, if they're smart, sell out to some biggie, e.g. COMPAQ or IBM, since only a BIG organization has the resources to mackage, market, publish, and support a product of that magnitude.

Actually, you can purchase Office2000 and WordPerfect 2000 and Lotus Smartsuite Millenium -- the latter two under $120... Office is considerably more retail -- unless you corporate license under discount. Actually grey market versions of the later are under $25 each. I know, I bought both to compare them with the Office used at work and forced on me. I liked them (used SmartSuite96 at IBM for a while) and WordPerfect is now purchased and running on my wife's Linux box. I'm actually a WordStar 6 kind of guy, if I'm not using FrameMaker though. Bill -- bpechter(a)monmouth.com | Microsoft: Where do you want to go today? | Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow? | BSD: Are you guys coming, or what?

WP v5.1 was widely accepted as the "cat's meow" among DOS-based word processing software. WIth the release of 5.2, one could see the begining of the end, however, since Lotus and MS had both put considerably better suites out there. Since Lotus could do it and WP couldn't there was no reason to believe any foulplay on MS' part was at work. When Windows 3.1 came out I don't think MSOffice had been released yet. It was a VERY popular product, since it had Excel, Word6, Access2, and Powerpoint (the famous BS-Generator) incorporated in it. Works was not up to snuff yet, though it was commonly bundled with Windows in OEM machines. The sense I got was that WORKS was intended for home use and was donated gratis to LOTS of different school systems in an effort to entice them to give up the Mac, which was markedly easier to teach and for teachers to use. Apple even ran a program here in the Denver area that involved selling Mac's below cost to teachers and administrators. It didn't work over the long run, though I did see a number of PC's, typically 2 or 3 per school which were sitting unused except for a comm program to handle comms with the main admin building downtown. It really pointed up how uninformed teachers and administrators were about these two competing systems. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis(a)mcmanis.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, May 07, 2000 6:16 PM Subject: Re: I wrote 'Nuke Redmond'