From: Justin Mason (jm at domain jmason.org)
Date: Wed 10 May 2000 - 11:59:58 IST
"Caolan McNamara" said:
> 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.
I'd like to agree with this. This is exactly what happened to
PenWindows...
* company C (Go Computers) writes small, cool OS, PenPoint, built around
pen input (long time before the Palm BTW)
* customer base B oohs and aahs
* company A says "oh never mind that, here is the magic of PenWindows"
("It's Windows! but with a pen!")
* customer base B says to itself "I will wait until that
is available, then I will buy that" as Caolan said
* company C goes bust
It's like, what, about 10 years on? And still no PenWindows. What a
surprise! There's lots of other examples (Netscape being the obvious
one), and they've applied this strategy across the board, even for things
like middleware technologies.
BTW regarding Junkbuster -- if you're on RH, use Stefan Waldherr's
version, it's nicely set up with lots of preconfigured details:
http://www.waldherr.org/junkbuster/download.shtml . I'd also suggest
modifying it a little to be less fascist about cookies; by default it'll
block everything, I prefer blocking specific sites' cookies so I can log
in to slashdot, advogato, etc.
--j.
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