To first address an earlier question - yes, I own some APLX stock (and some people here may recall I in fact co-established their - Applix's - UK operations back in the late '80s) and am not playing devil's-advocate for the hell of it. Simply being pragmatic; since when did paradigm-shift seeking ideology count for anything in any business?
The generic Internet (which means everything/nothing) is THE shift in IT ideology - the big one. That's it, for a while - now we are all looking for ways to usefully use it (The Internet). The Lotus 1-2-3 equivalent of way back when is, is, is, er?
Microsoft has embraced the Internet. QED.
Anyway, Marky - yes, I agree. The perceived usability test of these new-era apps is what it is all about; hence why MS Word eventually (and even that took some while) killed WordPerfect - something about it was just 'easier' and also documents of many object types were easier to make by anyone - me, you, a secreatary, a kid doing homework.
If the look and feel of these new apps is not identical or so much, much more intuitive, they will not persuade anyone to can thousands of man-years of experience of MS Office, etc. No way.
This is total speculation but I would project that people will not think of radically changing from MS Office until a VRML-like interface is really proven and so easy to use it will become the preferred choice.
People only bought PCs because, hell, sure they MUST be easier than an electric typewriter and Tippex?! They were. They bought lots more. Especially when 1-2-3 came out.
OK, there are these NC into education deals going down - so what? Exactly what Apple relied on for all the wrong reasons in its dying days - you grow a business by selling to business.
NCs ain't no replacement for no electric typewriter. Oh, and whilst SGML, HTML are damn fine open standards (SGML - sweet memories; been around long enough, for heavens sake), I ain't seeing any ITT documents (or even 2 line memos) from my company or from any clients, etc, written in HTML/SGML. All in 100% MS Word, as it happens - or email message text. Maybe we are all doing something wrong, using such a dying format as MS Word ...?
Hmmm ... anyway, all the best for '98, folks. |
