Dear Dinesh:
The price has increased. However competing packages have decreased. The increasing code size has more to do with adding bells and whistles by a "neato" design strategy. What most people want are not the bloated Microsoft code but, lean and mean code. Today's word processors do not do much more than the old word processors but, they take 100 times the code. The code was added to do things that main stream word processors do not do. It has been shown, that smaller programs that do specific jobs real well are much preferred to a massive program that does all jobs somewhat ok. To bury things into an OS is not ok. Just what is necessary should be put into an OS. all other tasks should be reserved for application programs and layers. Thus only the necessary quick and small code should be in the OS. This is why linux uses a kernel that can run in the old machines with limited resources. Those machines with larger resources can add more applications or "plug-ins". Most of the time, the experts, say to use the right tool for the job rather than some huge unwieldly tool. It does not take as long and the users do not get fustrated. I still use Wordstar, a older word processor for most of my document editing needs. It allows me to use a few commands instead of the ten tons of menus in Word i have to go through to do the same job. I have had users who disdained the "improved" Word Perfect versions because they were larger, slower, and required more time to learn how to get the job right. When asked why they did not switch to version 6.0 from 5.1, they, to a person, said that the old version just "Flew" on their new machines. The old version allowed them to do a days work in two hours on the new machines. The new version was tried. Too many changes stopped them from using the shortcuts they found in the old version to do their work. And even when they found the new shortcuts, the new version ran slower on their new machines then the old version ran on the older boxes.
Why should I or anyone else pay for Microsofts bad design choices? Just because they made it larger does not mean they made it better. Every time they change the version, they invalidate to much of the ways people had to do their jobs. The retraining costs are far more than the cost of the OS. Most other OS change far less. They grandfather the old ways so that retraining does not need to occur. They tell you which features will be missing in the upcoming versions so that you can relearn more slowly. In general, most changes are for the better and thus people want to do it the new way. This is why these products, although more expensive, are much preferred to the "Microsoft Way" of doing things. There is a growing revolt to the constant thrashing of new Microsoft versions. This revolt is beginning to affect Microsofts bottom line. The major reason they added code was to get more money rather than give their customers more value. All the major Microsoft "innovations" were either bought from some one else or stolen. Microsoft Basic (stolen from MITS), MS-DOS (bought from Seattle Micro), Xenix (bought from SCO), Windows (stolen from GEM or from Xerox PARC), and Excel (stolen from Lotus now IBM). So do not give me Microsoft PR instead of the truth.
Pete |
