Re: About satandrads and politics

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Bud Beckman wrote:

> my hands on a computer keyboard. We are consumers looking for the best
> buy and not the best standard, sorry to say. MS has been able to take the
> competition and bend it to its own liking because it had "market share."

Interesting counter example: Java beat active X because it was a better
standard, and despite the fact that MS's product won ultimately, they were
forced to support the competing standard.

The example with MS office is somewhat different: there was no
industry wide "Standard" document format, so the industry standardised on
the document formats of a single vendor. The users still chose standards
over the quality of the product: one of the main things that keeps MS
Office selling so well is the fact that it is the only office suite that
completely conforms to the (defacto) standard.

-- 
Donovan