On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 10:29:27PM -0800, paul beard wrote:

> rtf seems to be one of those standards with a bit of leeway to it:
> not everyone's rtf plays well with others. And there's always the
> issue of someone double-clicking on a icon and nothing happening.
> Akin to my old tech support memories of users deducing "I can't
> get my email, therefore the internet must be down" one can only
> imagine the aggravation of getting a new document<->application
> association to work.

Microsoft could do this trivially.

They butcher rtf from what I've seen.

I've had a hard time using rtf for file interchange.

You are right about people being double-click dependent.

I was asked to send a resume in Word, and when I told the company I
couldn't do that, they proceeded to tell me how.  I had to interrupt
and say, "You don't understand, I don't run Windows."

There was nearly a full minute of silence on the other end.  I told them
I would sent PostScript, HTML, and text versions of the document. They
were unable to load any of them.  One of them was MCSE certified.

I actually got the job without the resume, after a 30 minute interview
with the engineers who had brains, but if I'd been denied that chance
I doubt I would have gotten through the mush-brains in HR.

> you could use applixware on *nix and windows for (the last version 
> I bought: 4.x) $100. Pretty reasonable but not all the usable as I 
> recall.

Applixware does some seriously funky stuff, especially with printing.
Instead of just piping PostScript to lpr, they start up a copy of applix
to spool it out via their own "gateway" daemon, and it rarely works on
my system.

> What are we really after here? If MSFT were broken up into Apps
> and OSes, two separate entities, and MSApps released Office or the
> component apps for *nix, would you buy it? Or is this all about 
> not using any MSFT products no matter how much sense it might 
> make? And understand, I'm aware of the predatory actions and all 
> the rest: I think the state of the art has been set back 5-10 
> years as a result of it all. But if you could just use the apps 
> and they were reliable and reasonably priced, would you use them?
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Well, now isn't that the problem after all?

I think I would also add "not bloated" and "not license encumbered"
to the mix, and probably "not scheduled obsolescence" to boot.

If they would start playing the game fair, would stop trying to lock
me in, and stop making everything I do obsolete ever two years, I
might use their stuff.

Then again, I don't really like Word, so I would not likely use it.
Excel, minus the mathematical bugs, I might think about.

I hope it's all irrelevant pretty soon.

-- 
UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza__________________________________shannon@widomaker.com