RBW wrote:
For one thing they will need a much higher reliability for Internet
connectivity for most end users above and beyond just extending the
reach of broadband...
It's more than that. They need a technical advance and a marketing advance.
The technical advance is bandwidth--*Upload* bandwidth. People are used
to about 50 mega*bytes* per second from their internal hard drive.
Anything else feels "sluggish". Try running a mail server purely
external to a corporation for an example. That 6 Megabyte Powerpoint is
a pain to send around. People think Gmail and its ilk are cool until
they have to start shipping around multimegabyte emails. And, before
the "put it on a website" people get started, it has to be uploaded
*sometime* whether to a web server, email server, file server, whatever.
Comparable uploads right now are 512 kilo*bits* per second or about 50
kilo*bytes* per second. We're talking a difference of *3 orders of
magnitude* (50 kilobytes per second vs 50 megabytes per second).
The marketing advance--exactly what idiot is going to trust their
sensitive data to *anyone* outside of their direct control. Clearly
this can be overcome by marketing--witness the parade of morons who
outsourced the handling of medical records to low wage countries and the
resultant fiascoes. However, smart companies are *never* going to want
to give an external entity access to their private information.
"M$ basically does three things, marketing, litigating and publishing
software... They suck really badly at only one of those three things"
I disagree. They are geniuses at all three of those tasks. Note that
you said *publishing* software, not *creating* software.
As for creating software, I'm not sure I would claim that they suck at
that either. They have created a set of applications that legions of
businesses run on. That's not a definition of "suckage" that I would be
prepared to defend.
While I understand the reason why Microsoft is fighting the OpenDocument
stuff in Massachusetts, once they decide to support it (and they will)
all of the old arguments about how expensive it is to change come back
into force. Microsoft has the benefit of *inertia*; it is the
entrenched interest that everybody currently uses.
-a
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