Microsoft Hatred FAQ 5134

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 05:26:51 +0000, John Bokma

"Again"?

What exactly *is* your point? You seem to be oscillating from "Microsoft doesn't care what browser people use" to "Microsoft cares deeply what browser people use". I don't understand what you are trying to say.

No. My point is, IF web-based apps become popular, and back in the 1990s people thought that they would, and they would run on any browser, then you could run your browser on any operating system on any hardware. That's what Microsoft wanted to stop, by gluing the browser to the OS.

As I said, back in the 90s that's what people thought, including Microsoft.

As for OpenOffice, yes, there is a slow migration away from MS Office. If you are in the US, the UK or Australia, you probably won't have noticed it, since it is a tiny trickle in those countries. But in the emerging IT markets of Asia (especially China), Europe and South America, that trickle has become a steady stream.

Especially now that Gartner has claimed that migrating from current versions of Office to Office 12 will cost ten times more for training alone than migrating to OpenOffice, I think we can expect to see that trickle start gushing in the next twelve months or so.

Rumour has it that Google is preparing to do exactly that.

Personally, I don't see the point. I would never use a web-based office suite, but then I don't even like web mail.

What's more important these days from Microsoft's strategic planning is multimedia. Yes, they want -- need -- to keep control of the office suite, Office gives them something like 1-2 their revenue. But for the long-term, they want to lock folks into their proprietary Internet-based multimedia systems (e.g. streaming wmv over mms) because they think that this will give them control of a very lucrative business. I can't really disagree with them.

-- Steven.