On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 9:23 AM, Ken Schaefer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I doubt that Microsoft's deliberately locking out competitors.
Well, "deliberate" is open to interpretation. Microsoft's designs tend to only work well with their own stuff. That's almost certainly cheaper for them to design that way, so there is an incentive not to care about competitors. And there's little short-term profit incentive to be compatible with competitors. So it doesn't require any big conspiracy or anything for that to happen. (That is hardly unique to Microsoft, of course.) There have also been numerous court cases and information leaks where Microsoft was found to be deliberately locking-out competitors as a design goal, so I also wouldn't put it past them. (This is isn't unique to Microsoft, either. A lot of companies only care about standards when they can use their product's standards-compliance as a selling point.) (But the fact that Microsoft isn't the only one doing something doesn't mean it's okay.) > Rewriting that entire code base is going to be an effort that will take a > couple of > revisions of the product. Of course. Even if Microsoft decided today that they were going to put standards-compliance as their first priority for everything, it would be years before such a re-implementation effort could be finished. -- Ben ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
