[ILUG] M$Orifice for Linux

[Caolan McNamara]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 10.05.00, 10:52:51, Noel Carroll <Noel.Carroll at CardBase.com> wrote 
regarding [ILUG] M$Orifice for Linux:

> I heard somewhere the other day that M$ have 34 developers working on
> porting Orifice to Linux.   I think this story has been going around for 
a
> while as I'm certain I heard something like that on /. over a year ago.  
My
> point is anyway that I couldn't see this going very far for M$.   

Imagine that you have unscrupulous company A, customer base B, and 
potential competitors C. 

Competitors C see a market for a word processor on platform Linux, 
writing wp is a lot of effort, commercial companies require a potential 
base B to buy it. It must be as featured as company As. B will buy it if 
that can be guaranteed. Unscrupulous A announces that they will port 
their wp to Linux, innocent base B says to itself "I will wait until that 
is available, then I will buy that", competitors C are stymied, they 
cannot get advance orders, everyone goes into a holding pattern waiting 
for A to announce its plans one way or the other. Clever tactic, yes? 

No point waiting for something which is even less than vapourware, its 
just standard ms mechanism for frightening competitors and freezing 
customers. Its existence as a rumour is probably more useful than its 
reality. MS also let it be known that Office2k would use xml as its 
native file format, I had a few small wv contracts that pulled out of a 
funding discussion because they believed the hype that they would be able 
to parse .doc's with xml tools. Believing a single word about a ms 
product before you can put your own hands on it yourself is a fatal 
error. 

C.