Gottfried,
As Andreas wrote:"The corporations made the Microsoft monopoly by standardising on it, (thus suffocating all the other vendors)."
I thought I wrote that <g>
But as soon as the Standard was established, Bill Gate stop being Robin Hood and became worst than IBM at it worst. We been betrayed.
You may want to try making living writing software. For each one Microsoft or Oracle, there are 10s of thousands failures, fortunes and lives wasted, families broken, all developing products that never made it.
I think the prices MSFT charges are fair compared to their mainframe, and Unix vendors, while MSFT delivers as much in some areas, much more in other areas.
If you want old DOS prices, you may want to stay in DOS. DOS and DOS apps were a lot less complex to write. Windows apps tend to be more costly to develop, they have a lot more functionality, can multitask, share data, desktop and resources with other apps, are generally more user friendly, use graphical user interface, some, like Office can be programmed through built in script language - VBA, the apps (plus the windows driver model) can use all possible hardware combinations, can often run in different languages other than English. All of these comes at an increased development cost, Q&A cost. Why do you think should MSFT give all this added value away for free?
The Standard (possibility to make fully compatible clone) should not belong to MS. That my point. After 10 to 15 years using Windows, Office, ... nobody can go LINUX or other set-up because they could lost everything accumulated since.
There apparently is something called Star Office for Linux that is using file formats compatible with Office, and has a similar look and feel as Office.
Joe |
