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On Sunday, November 3, 2002, at 10:29 AM, Steve Furlong wrote: > > Agreed. Setup should be pretty simple, but daily use for the unwashed > masses has to be one-click. And version compatibility problems have > _got_ to disappear. Actually, PGP's Outlook plug-in comes pretty close > to this. As with the situation a decade ago, there are: * several OSes in use (2-3 in Wintel world, 2 in Mac world, plus outliers) * various release versions of each * about 5-8 major mail programs covering these platforms * about 3-5 major newsreader programs (Things were the same in 1993, when PGP "needed to be integrated with" elm, pine, Eudora, tin, emacs, and on half a dozen OSes which people were using. Not surprisingly, this integration was never completed, as PGP changes, as OSes changed, as elm and pine got dropped and newer programs came to the fore. Now the Golden Age will arrive if only people adopted Outlook on a Windows XP machine.) A vendor who wants to integrate his program needs to deal with about 100 combinations to cover 90% of users. He can reduce this from having to support 300 combos by saying "We don't support OS 9" or "We support Entourage, Outlook, Outlook Express, and Eudora only." Several times over the past decade I have heard people urge others to change their mailer to one that is supported. This is even worse than "not one-click operation," as it asks users to abandon programs and OSes they like or need in order to obtain a marginal gain of sending a receiving encrypted messages with one click. (I already said what I think is the cleanest solution: treat crypto as something applied to text, forgetting about integration as the core feature.) > - --Tim May "That government is best which governs not at all." --Henry David Thoreau -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 (Build 288) Beta iQA/AwUBPcWE/fHMrDA90hdkEQKR+gCdGqlyJZl+lgOexwIh9O3Ql7lCzIQAoNWN Oe2iAcELJIStDMR8l0c7EaT+ =j0os -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
