Standards are another thing. The market leader always wants to eschew
standards. IBM used to do this in the mainframe business. Back in the
'60s, the standard was ASCII, and IBM used EBCDIC, the standard for
databases was network, IBM went hierachial. There were other things
also. We see Microsoft doing this with languages like C and BASIC.
They do it with email and with networking, with web hosting. They even
violate their own standards. Some of this is deliberate, some is
engineering expedient.
Microsoft does not have a strong management directive to follow
standards, and being the market leader, they have an economic reason
to depart from standards. Since deoparting from a given standard sets up
a defacto standard that only Microsoft is following tends to lock in their
customers. Another area that IBM was famous for doing was subverting
standards. Their rep on a standards committee would attempt to steer
the standards committee in the opposite direction froim where IBM was
going.
On 5 Jun 2000, at 9:29, Warren Mansur wrote:
> It's the typical Microsoft thing. Take a standard, make it slightly
> incompatible, and then try to make their incompatible version the new
> standard. They tried that with Java already (and failed thank
> goodness).
Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org
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