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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ed who wrote (21875)	12/2/1998 3:15:00 PM
From: Andy Thomas	Respond to of 24154

An OS should come with powerful development tools at the very least. There should be a good command line, even if the thing is a part of the overall, otherwise mouse-driven GUI. The GUI should also have a keystroke equivalent for every mouse click. MSFT started to get away from this with win95. MSFT hasn't done any serious work on their command line for their consumer OSes since dos 6.x. Win95 added some things to the VMs but not much. Command.com should have been expanded to have many more commands, and some of the old commands should have been re-written to have made more sense and had more utility. They should have written a graphical command line app. I prototyped and actually got working to some extent, a graphical command line in one weekend using Borland Delphi. Why didn't MSFT devote any resources to tackle this? I remember once in the hallway listening to one of the MS-DOS 6 managers, saying that perhaps some of the upcoming work for a future plus pack would include a graphical command line app. When development was put under way for win95, this idea was snubbed. I remember having emailed the same manager, and he'd replied that was pretty much the case. I wonder what went on in the management meetings to take them away from good command line support? I don't understand why they didn't provide something of great utility to their advanced users. They also could have put the batch language on steroids, allowing variables for example. They didn't do any of this. Their OS and browser crash with regularity and in their marketing I've never seen them mention any of this. A person's first PC can be a frightful thing at that point where their windows os crashes. The win98 ad says "apps load 36% faster." It looks to me like the initial window loads faster, but the rest of the app takes the same overall. It seems they did some trick to get that first window up... maybe I'm mistaken here. These machines aren't that complicated. The educated consumer may begin to look elsewhere upon realizing that there are a few alternatives; Be, LINUX, and Caldera for starters. I've heard Be comes with a compiler. I wonder if Caldera comes with a compiler? Does anyone here know? I think MSFT should have written more OSes than they have now. Maybe they should have their own version of LINUX. They could bring in some high-paid talent to write a LINUX shell in assembler. It would be so fast and tight. Maybe they could make money off of that somehow. <g> FWIW Andy