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To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (17238)	2/7/1998 6:16:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Readers offer ways vendors can deliver them from DLL hell infoworld.com Or, maybe that's where you want to go. Application vendors should be prohibited from distributing parts of the OS with their applications," writes Kevin Klein of Millennium Partners. "It ought to be Microsoft's responsibility to provide a stable platform for running applications (that's what an OS is, after all). The whole Windows\System32 subdirectory should be write-protected to applications. All of the interim bug fixes and API upgrades should be packaged by Microsoft into clearly identifiable units, similar to the current service packs but with finer granularity, and released much more frequently." Sounds good, I guess. Maybe you should just keep IE4 around and always reinstall it last. I don't quite understand why the Windows runtime dll's aren't readonly to begin with. Mark Thrailkill writes, "Since Microsoft released VB 5 with newer versions of VB 4 controls without backward compatibility -- thereby creating the potential for the installation of VB 5 applications to disable VB 4 applications using the same controls -- do they care?" Is that a rhetorical question? Putting the customers first, the OEMs as Microsoft's most important customers have a lot of experience with Microsoft's postition on that quaint little maxim. I can't claim any special knowledge in this area, just another source of amusement. Cheers, Dan.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (17238)	2/7/1998 6:20:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

Predictions from the Fringe infoworld.com These seem to be from viewer mail, only 1 out of 5 rate here. 1. Bill Gates will keep making an analogy comparing computing with the auto industry. No one will mention there are a total of zero automobile companies owning anywhere close to 40 percent of the market, let alone 95 percent. The Chrysler car radio rides again! Cheers, Dan.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (17238)	2/7/1998 6:44:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

Microsoft's Sidewalk stumble boston.com Heck, I just couldn't resist the intro on this article for our local new media guru. On a subject that he's touted as a big win for Microsoft, no less. John F. Kennedy once famously said of the CIA: ''Your successes are unheralded, your failures are trumpeted.'' With Microsoft Corp., it's just the opposite. Twenty times a day, we hear how Microsoft's plan for world domination is approaching fruition. Yet, happily for those of us mired in the ''old'' media, Microsoft makes some big goofs. Hey, but they'll all be fixed in NT5! You're dead meat guy, along with the rest of us Microskeptics. Last month, Microsoft laid off between 30 and 40 Sidewalkers in cities where it currently operates. This being Microsoft - the CIA analogy is not entirely fortuitous - the retrenching is being called ... an expansion. Sidewalk boss Matt Kursh told ZDNet news that he planned to quintuple the number of city sites in 1998, which he called ''a major, major commitment to the business.'' Like one of its competitors, America Online's Digital City, Sidewalk sites will become more generic, and less ''local'' in content. How bad is Sidewalk? Let's be fair; it's not as bad as unanesthetized gum surgery, or perhaps the bubonic plague. It's roughly comparable with Digital City (boston.digitalcity.com) and Citysearch (citysearch.com). Of course, neither holds a candle to the Globe's boston.com site, where this column generates 300,000 hits daily. [:)] Bill Bass, an analyst at Cambridge-based Forrester Research believes Microsoft has lost $40 million on Sidewalk, so far. ''It's been a disaster and it will continue to be a disaster until they shut it down,'' he says. ''It irritates them when I say that, but it's true.'' I don't know. Microsoft seems to bring out the mean streak in people. It couldn't be because they're sort of mean, could it? Of course, that $40 million is chump change, old Joachim Kempin can just turn the screws a little harder on an OEM or 2 next time around to make it up. Cheers, Dan.