Mike - it's true that there is a large number of "MS cult followers",
as you call them. In fact, there are two distinct camps:
you have the "MS believers" and the "MS bashers".
It's not hard to see that you belong to the second group of
cult followers. Just your usage of "Microslop" says it all.
I realize that it will be of little use to argue with people in
your state of mind, but to say that MS is "falling short of
consumer demands" really is a gross joke.
After all, if that is so, then where does it leave Corel?
At one time I extensively used CorelDraw and Corel Ventura
to do software package design work, and these were, and still remain,
the slowest and buggiest commercial software products I've ever
used. Crashes were common during regular work, and even during
text file import! One was forced back to the ancient make-a-change-and-save paradigm. Low quality extended into the
documentation, which referred to wrong (old) versions of the
products and to procedures that were not available in the
release versions. Tech support acknowledged that there were
"problems". To their credit they tried to help me out by sending me
upgrades, which, however, crashed just as diligently.
Corel surely fell more short of my "consumer demands" than
even MS's Windows 3.1 ever did.
In short, it remember the relieve, after the job was done, to
be able to return to the good STABLE MS Word.
It's easy to say that you are tired of MS OS, but what are you
using today? What is keeping you from switching to
user-friendly Linux (ever tried to install?), cheap and open (...)
UNIX, perhaps even to switch to Mac OS? Or OS/2? Just don't be
disappointed after you do - there isn't anything that really
competes on price/performance with MS OS's, except UNIX on
high-end systems (where they've got the sysop on standby).
Anyway, let's not pollute the COSFF thread with anti/pro MS material,
which is not all that informative relative to Corel in any case.
Critical for COSFF is, according to Mr. Cowpland, Java, and
with Java, the NC. So there, the NC using Java: if these machines
are not going to run (and non-emulated, please) Windows then I
foresee that they will remain a niche. Few companies will really
want to switch to machines that require a complete software
retrain of their staff. However, if the NC will also run Windows
then it's going to be dangerously close to, you guessed it,
a (MS) NetPC... It's not all that hard to imagine that the NetPC
(running Java on top of Windows) will be the big winner in the
"NC wars". So, the question is: who will buy Office for Java for
these NetPC's in 1998 instead of (existing copies of?) MS Office.
The installed base of MS Office may be decisive.
A propos the NC, I'm trying to find out some facts that I haven't
heard anyone write/talk about. Do these machines have a PCI bus
so that you can add (cheap) industry-standard cards, do they have
proprietary busses that require proprietary cards, or is the
"beauty" of the NC that you CAN'T add anything (e.g. SCSI devices
like scanners).
Related, will it be possible to e.g. change display resolution, or
will the machines be fixed at, say, 640x480x8? In any case, I'm very
interested how these machines handle the hardware driver
issue, since there seems to be a multitude of OS's below the
"browser interface".
All for now!
-Alex |
