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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rudedog who wrote (62262)	10/28/2001 4:46:46 PM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

The problem with Netmeeting is, that most ADSL connections come with a hardware NAT router. It is unrealistic that a home user could configure such a router to support Netmeeting, and if you know that your friend's IP address is 192.168.1.30, Netmeeting will only laugh at you when you try to connect. Microsoft supplied home networking NAT is only useful for modem connections or connections where your Windows has a public IP address, which isn't the case if you got yourself an ordinary ADSL or Cable solution with a NAT router. The incompatibilities is not only in Office files. For instance, if you want to read an MS Access database from an external application, you use DAO for Office 97. The DAO version used is not compatible with a clean Office 2000 install, which makes it impossible for you to upgrade to Office 2000, unless you get a new version of the external application, which means you have to contact the programmer again. That can often be difficult. In corporations, it's often much easier, but then again, software often has to be rewritten, resources have to be assigned, which makes it a complicated test. Especially if you want the users to test what you did - then they need both Office versions installed at the same time, maybe they just need two PC's on their desktop. You can plan your way out of this, but it surely doesn't make things easier. The big incompatibilities between Office 97 and Office 2000 file formats found in non-English versions is another matter, but still something that generates a lot of work. And when it comes to drivers, Microsoft has never been 100% backwards compatible. Show me some hardware without Microsoft NT/2000/XP drivers that will work after you upgrade Windows 98 to XP, without trashing system performance. It wouldn't be so bad, being backwards incompatible, if you could convert all your data etc. But since many Microsoft-based solutions are not based on open file formats, but on API's that change, it _is_ bad. Imagine an Office automation system that made StarOffice 6.0 reports. Since it doesn't involve any StarOffice 6.0 code to generate reports, the Office suite just has to be StarOffice 6.0 file format compatible. That means that any future version of StarOffice, that is able to read version 6 files, will work as part of this office automation system. This kind of guarantee is impossible to give with Microsoft, since the only supported way of generating MS Office native formats is to use MS Office code. For a start, many small application vendors and corporate programmers will not guarantee that their apps work with Windows XP. They simply have no clue because they don't use XP themselves. Lars.