<You're missing the point of what a platform is.>
Maybe, but you are missing the point of actual functionality that many of the people with the purse strings will be looking for.
MS Office/VBA is practically a platform in itself, check it out before replying.
<NSCP provides an open platform that affords access to all of the application specific data types you've referred to.>
Access, but not convenient manipulation, which can be considered an extension of "access". There is a big difference. Go to my site at rcmfinancial.com and download the options model. Nav 3.0 may, or may not call Excel, depending on if you have the expertise to configure Excel as a viewer (Excel is now considered the industry standard). Communciator 4.0 or up "embeds" the model in the browser frame as an OLE object, taking up consider system resources (read 30% crash ratio on an 80 mb Pentium). This also limits the ease of manipulation. IE acts as an actual conatiner, and not a client, facilitating all the fucntionality of the source program (not just Excel, but any Active X compliant app, which is a lot). IE is also a lot easier on system resources. You can call it proprietary, but that is what most of the world is using on their desktops (the majority of computers).
<What does replication have to do with it?>
You discussed access, well when you have 800 salesmen reporting to the same database, and you don't want any one of them overwriting the other's work..... That is true "access" to data. NSCP is nascent in this area (at least to my knowledge).
<Text is text (as in plain ASCII or whatever text). Anything else can be transmitted easily and perfectly over the net as binary. It's up to specific applications to worry about the content of their own proprietary content structures.>
I think you missed my point. Text is text, but most text is not used as is as often as it used to be. Even email is being formatted (as html, rich text, MS Word files, etc.). The "specific applications" on the client end are VERY important, and that is where NSCP is falling short. NSCP, with Communicator, is attemtping to include the functionality of the client "specific application," but it does a shoddy job in comparison to MSFT, on all windows platforms and the Mac. The only platform where NSCP is excelling beyond MSFT is Unix, That is far from "any platfform". Lotus has recently included/licensed the IE object in its Lotus' Notes and Domino technology due to the fact that the IE container/object technolocgy is superior (remember the extant, yet uneasy cooperative relationship between NSCPand IBM/Lotus).
<All I know is that everyday I fire up my current version of NSCP's NGUI on whatever OS I'm using wherever I am, and I get access to documents on the net, publish docs on the net (HTML, binary, text), send/receive extremely ornate email, etc. and I'm not tied to MSFT's latest vertically closed set of apps or Lotus's peculiar workgroup dinosaur.>
Go to my content rich site (Excel models, Adobe PDF, Shockwave. MS Word, etc. not just MSFT stuff) and try it with Communciator on anything less than a Pentium II, then use IE. Big difference. It is not that NSCP's stuff doesn't work, it is just that MSFT's works much better. The only advantage that NSCP has is Unix compatibility. |
