MS makes yet another smart move 1716

People moved from, e.g., Wordperfect to MS Word. Why *can't* they move to another platform yet?

Linux is not an office suite. The vast majority of OSS programs are not office suites. Let's keep things in context, shall we?

MS Access isn't Word, which is what I was talking about. On the other hand, as has been pointed out to you, just such an item is coming in the next release.

Microsoft worked pretty hard to prevent that. They were worried. I think they have more reason to worry now (see below).

No. Few if any of those 'non-game applications' have no equivalents on other platforms. You can talk about 'slopware' (I noticed you shut up really fast when I pointed out that Linux and GNU software did vastly better than Windows on things like the 'fuzz test') but Windows was crap compared to the compebreastion and won based on price (and monopoly leverage, DOS et. al.). For many purposes, it was 'good enough'.

Microsoft has had trouble themselves. Remember the SQL Slammer attack that mucked up their internal operations for a few days?

High end, I'll grant they haven't been trying long (wonder why?). Low end, they've been after a while. Aside from PDAs, they haven't made too many strides in the low end.

Last I'd heard, WinCE had just caught up to PalmOS in terms of shipping rates, and market share still was in Palm's favor. See here:

It's a bit like Xbox vs. PS2; PalmOS has a *much* larger installed base. Secondly, PDAs as PDAs are dying; things are moving into the 'smartphone' area, and victory there is a lot less clear.

I agree, monopolies will do that to you.

Hasn't been much demand, but people are starting to carry around huge hard drives for a completely different purpose - music collections. If they are going to be carrying something like that around anyway, why not their whole computing evnironment?

-- Sincerely,

Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317

"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do." - Bertrand Russell