May The Best Mode Win
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From: Free Lunch on 23 Oct 2009 17:46 On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:50:11 -0700 (PDT), hancock4(a)bbs.cpcn.com wrote in misc.transport.road: >On Oct 23, 12:57�pm, Alan Baker <alangba...(a)telus.net> wrote: > >> > A great many small businesses, when asked if they have a product or >> > service, say "yes" when in fact they have nothing. �The business then >> > rushes out to get the customer what was requested. �The business is >> > obviously taking a big gamble, if it works the gamble usually pays off >> > handsomely and the small business grows quite a bit as a result. >> >> That may be, but in this case, what they rushed out to get was a rip-off >> of someone else's product. > >I'm not at all sure I'd call that a "rip off". > >That is a fact of business life. A great many people become wealthy >by merely acting as the middleman, connecting a seller and buyer. > >For sake of argument, say I need goat's milk. I go to my grocer who >doesn't carry it, but he says he'll get it. He makes phone calls and >gets it. He collects a profit for his work. I benefit by not having >to call around myself to wholesalers or farms, heck I wouldn't know >what farms to call. > >IBM didn't know who made PC software, so they asked Gates. Gates did >know and exploited "leveraged" his knowledge. IBM was the biggest software company in the world. Had they treated the PC seriously, they wouldn't have been whipped by everyone else.
From: Otto Yamamoto on 23 Oct 2009 22:03 On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:58:37 -0400, Douglas W. \"Popeye\" Frederick wrote: > Oh, you won't be missing it at all. Au contraire. Bush and Obama are pretty much the same to me in most respects; the only difference being Bush's superior ability to draw fire. -- 'Smoking is Healthier than Fascism'
From: Daniel W. Rouse Jr. on 23 Oct 2009 23:33 "Floyd Rogers" <fbloogyuds(a)hotmail.com> wrote in message news:_POdneKw5NdxJ3zXnZ2dnUVZ_umdnZ2d(a)posted.palinacquisition... > "RonB" <ronb02NOSPAM(a)gmail.com> wrote >> Daniel W. Rouse Jr. wrote: > ... >> And what people tend to forget when they laud Microsoft's business >> acumen, is that Microsoft's monopoly was built on the back of IBM's >> original PC monopoly. It was a matter of pure, dumb luck. > Except for I didn't write the above. It was quoted from someone else's post and wrongly attributed to me. [snip...]
From: Daniel W. Rouse Jr. on 23 Oct 2009 23:41 <hancock4(a)bbs.cpcn.com> wrote in message news:cfbabdf0-4b5a-4084-9226-c98c68828da8(a)m1g2000vbi.googlegroups.com... On Oct 22, 11:54 pm, "Daniel W. Rouse Jr." <dwrous...(a)nethere.comNOSPAM> wrote: > Indeed. But Microsoft Office is usually the popular choice, given that a > large userbase often shared word documents, excel spreadsheets, etc. Question: Word Perfect and Lotus used to have a large user base and were almost the 'standard' in industry. What happened that motivated companies to spend the money to switch from those to MS-Word and Excel? Many people had to convert their doucments or spreadsheets and be retrained. * To which I'll answer. WordPerfect was as good as it could get in its DOS days, but then when a GUI/WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word was around, suddenly dealing with reveal codes and such was just so cumbersome. (And yes, I know that MS Word effectively hides by default a lot of its paragraph attributes that can also be considered similar to codes). Nowadays, MS Word is so much more than just a word processor, it's practically a desktop publisher--but it still does provide support for many of the other word processor formats as far as being able to read them into MS Word. (Open dialog box in Office 2007 has support for WordPerfect 5.x and 6.x documents, Save As dialog box has support for mainly MS software formats except for plain text, rich text, and web page.) As for Excel, I'm not sure how it got so popular, but someone with more experience comparing/contrasting the finer points of Lotus 1-2-3 vs. Excel might be able to expand on that.
From: Daniel W. Rouse Jr. on 23 Oct 2009 23:51
"chrisv" <chrisv(a)nospam.invalid> wrote in message news:foi3e55um783dq7h9sl57sos2c2cbnj5p0(a)4ax.com... > hancock4(a)bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > >>On Oct 22, 11:54 pm, "Daniel W. Rouse Jr." >>> >>> Indeed. But Microsoft Office is usually the popular choice, given that a >>> large userbase often shared word documents, excel spreadsheets, etc. >> >>Question: Word Perfect and Lotus used to have a large user base and >>were almost the 'standard' in industry. What happened that motivated >>companies to spend the money to switch from those to MS-Word and >>Excel? Many people had to convert their doucments or spreadsheets and >>be retrained. > > How about going to OEM's, who had no choice but to buy Microsoft's > operating system, and pressuring them (or "incentifying" them) to > recommend and bundle their office products? > > How did they kill Netscape so quickly? Not only did they give IE away > for free, but they placed its icon front and center on the desktop, > and *disallowed* any alternative product being there. > Disallowed any product being on the desktop? Maybe as part of an OEM system agreement. But for sure, it was very possible to install an alternative product and the installer of that product most certainly did also place an icon on the desktop. Remember, browser/desktop/OS integration did not occur until MSIE 4.0 and its Active Desktop functionality. IE 2.0 and IE 3.0 were still just standalone browsers, just like NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator--both of which installed without error and were quite usable on Windows 95 systems that were available at the time of the initial web browser offerings. Even then, MSIE 4.0 was an optional download for Windows 95 users. It was not until Windows 98 that the MSIE 4.0 browser/desktop/OS integration was fully integrated into the OS. > It's that whole "leveraging your market power" thing. > Oh yeah, and Netscape didn't do just that? They introduced the whole Cookies thing. Then came LiveScript/JavaScript. For better or for worse, the evolution of what has become a significant part of the web (AJAX, etc.) without the use of any actual Java applets or server based stuff was due to in part to Netscape extending past established standards very early on, and so *their* marketshare had been leveraged quite a bit to force others to adapt to the newest functionality. (Many sites stopped working with JavaScript disabled. Many sites didn't work properly unless cookies were enabled). MSIE just beat them at their own game of extending beyond standards and just did one better--similar functionality, but fully integrated into the OS as of Windows 98, no alternative browser needed. And still yet, one could install Netscape Navigator as an alternative and use it (installation was still never blocked), even with the MSIE browser fully integrated into the OS. |