On Mon, May 13, 2002 at 04:12:03PM +0200, David Neary mentioned:
> The steps required to monopolise the market are:
> 1) Get Exchange & Outlook to critical mass (the point where the market
> perceives that it can't do without them).
You missed step 0) "Steal underpants".
> 2) Add value on the client side so that other mail clients can't
> read mail coming from an Outlook client as well as another
> Outlook client can (and mail from non-Outlook clients doesn't
> look as good as mail from Outlook clients).
> 3) Add value on the server side so that other mail servers don't
> provide features that you do, and if they do those features are
> incompatible with yours.
> 4) Abandon pretense of portable mail, so that only outlook can
> read mail from outlook clients (create a new proprietary mail
> format to replace plain text or HTML, basically).
AKA MS Word, the ideal format to supercede plain text or HTML. All they
need to do is make Outlook open Word to send mail by default if it's
installed.
> 5) Extend SMTP so that non-MS servers can't talk to Exchange any
> more
AKA authentication.
> 6) Deprecate plain text mail in favour of the "better" MS format,
> so that non-Outlook clients can no longer send mail to outlook
> users without causing them hassle.
AKA a checkbox.
> 7) Replace SMTP completely, so that Exchange can't receive mail
> from non-MS mail servers.
AKA a "trust non-compatible email servers" checkbox.
> So the question, again, is (a) am I being excessively paranoid?
> and (b) how can free software possibly hope to prevent Microsoft
> gaining a monopoly in any market it chooses to dominate?
I don't think we can stop it. If people want to be locked in, they'll
fight tooth and nail for the priviledge. If you want to stop it, you could
try write free software with as simple a GUI as MS Exchange, that provides
features that hackers think are pointless, and office types don't know
they love yet.
Kate
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