The XP SP2 Horror to come.

(Sam Byrams) scribbled some garbage about a
problem in om: and
Dman answered with his usually sarcastic remark in the following manner!


Apparently you are to daft to really understand how the real world
works. Your output from a particular program has to be able to be
used by THE OTHER PRODUCTIVITY PACKAGES you refer to. Yes there are
other packages available and as soon as you get a few hundred million
machines running them then you may have a somewhat valid point.
But right now you are ****ing in the wind with little information to
really back it up.

You are under a powerful narcotic, apparently manufactured in
Redmond, that makes people unable to comprehend that other programs
can generate, accept, and convert M$ Word and Excel files. They can.
You do not need M$ Word to read Word files.


Further, the only reason to produce a .doc file is so that you can
Print the file and send it on as a physical letter. .pdf files work a
lot better if you need a 'virtual document'.

No, it's not a narcotic, it's just REALITY. Believe me I have no LOVE at
all for M$ or anything related to them. I just know what happens in the
real world.
Why you would use a word .doc as your example is frivilous and doesn't
really have a valid basis.
I more refer to the Excel, Access, Powerpoint areas and their dominance
and lack of useabilty with other programs. Notice I did not say 100% or
the time.

:0

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ummh a Freudian slip lol. just kidding

Jim

ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net (Ben Myers) wrote in message
...
I meant to say: "I do not count myself as a friend of Microsoft and I take
every
possible opportunity to evaluate, use, and promote the use of
NON-Microsoft
products." Wash my mouth out with soap! ... Ben

On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 02:04:04 GMT, ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net (Ben
Myers) wrote:

Interchange of .DOC and .XLS files is not the BIG issue here. The issues
here
are training less-than-brilliant people to use a new and slightly
different
software package (e.g. OpenOffice), then suffering through all the
problems
which ensue when converting documents and spreadsheets to and from
Microsoft
Office formats. For one or two people, a small family or even a small and
isolated company, these are not problems. For large companies, training
and
loss of productivity can quickly eat up the savings from using
non-Microsoft
Office products.

I once worked in an organization that thought it could provide the
ultimate in
perfect conversion of documents from one format to another. They failed.
Believe me, it ain't easy. Just when OpenOffice gets it right with 99.9%
of
document conversion, Microsoft (like Lucy pulling the football away from
Charlie
Brown) adds more bells and whistles to the next release of Office, a
moving
target. NOBODY advertises PERFECT document interchange with Office.
Except
Microsoft, who even had to be pushed by irate customers into providing
two-way
document compatibility between Office 95 and Office 97.

Still, some organizations are so fed up with Microsoft's high-handed
practices
and pricing that they ARE moving to non-Microsoft products. Several
governmental units in Germany are buying inexpensive Linux boxes to
replace
their Windows machines. The anti-Microsoft sentiment in Europe is and
always
has been very strong. China is not exactly in love with Microsoft,
either. Any
groundswell of movement away from Microsoft Office is most likely to begin
outside the US.

Microsoft's dominance is very much comparable to IBM's position with
mainframes
in the '70s. It took an absolutely seismic paradigm shift (crappy
buzzwords,
but accurate in their depiction) to reduce IBM's role in the computer
industry
to a much less influential one. And, of course, the seismic paradigm
shift was
the introduction of personal computers by the self-same IBM, and the
subsequent
rapid deployment of them by all and sundry.

Moving everybody from Windows & Office to Linux & Open Office is not the
type of
seismic shift that will make serious inroads into Microsoft's dominant
position.
And, anyway, it is extremely unlikely to happen, unfortunately. I do not
count
myself as a friend of Microsoft and I take every possible opportunity to
evaluate, use, and promote the use of Microsoft products. But the sad
fact
remains that unless many large organizations get so totally ****ed off
with
Microsoft that they do a wholesale move away from Windows and Office (and
several collaborative "server" products such as Exchange Server), we are
stuck
with Office for a long long time.

Now, if you can foresee the seismic paradigm shift that will unseat
Microsoft
from its software dominance, make your investments now, 'cause you'll end
up
fabulously wealthy... Ben Myers

On 21 Aug 2004 15:06:27 -0700, (Sam Byrams)
wrote:


Apparently you are to daft to really understand how the real world
works.
Your output from a particular program has to be able to be used by THE
OTHER PRODUCTIVITY PACKAGES you refer to. Yes there are other packages
available and as soon as you get a few hundred million machines running
them then you may have a somewhat valid point.
But right now you are ****ing in the wind with little information to
really back it up.

You are under a powerful narcotic, apparently manufactured in
Redmond, that makes people unable to comprehend that other programs
can generate, accept, and convert M$ Word and Excel files. They can.
You do not need M$ Word to read Word files.


Further, the only reason to produce a .doc file is so that you can
Print the file and send it on as a physical letter. .pdf files work a
lot better if you need a 'virtual document'.