>I agree with Karsten.
>
>Look for instance what Microsoft did with Apple. They made out of office 98 an
>important application for Mac OS. Then they told Apple if the don't make IE
>their preferred browser they won't support Office 98 anymore.
>
>I think it's best and most safe to use public domain and shareware product for
>Linux if possible. And certainly don't support the MS monopoly at this time.
>
The MS Office/ Apple question is (from my perspective) a bit deeper than
you describe.
For one thing, the decision to do IE as the default browser predates the
release of Office 98.
Office (more specifically Word and Excel) were made important applications
on the Macintosh (at least in part) by distributing copies of Office (Word
5 and Excel) for free in the early 1990's. MS gave everyone at the LA Mac
User Group meeting a free copy of Office (~$395 at the time ; aprox 800
people at the meeting) and I know that this was not the only user group
that got this special promotion. They effectively dumped this product into
the Mac world by making it very inexpensive (even if you did pay something
for it)
To their credit, Word 5.1 was a very good word processor. The problem is
not with the quality of Word 5.1, but the effect of their 'dumping' product
into the market. The landscape for word processors and spreadsheets dried
up so that Word Perfect, Nisus, Write Now and others had no market to sell
to. Each of those programs had advantages over Word, and to this day, Nisus
is a very powerful word processor with no market.
After MS killed the market for office products by dumping Word 5.1 on the
world, the came out with Word 6 which was almost completely unusable. I
find it hard to believe that software that bad could be released. Of
course, by this time there were no other alternatives on the Mac so to get
office applications, you had to move to Windows, where the full suite of
Office products works just fine thank you.
Now we are at Office 98 which is not bad and in many respects very good.
That does not mitigate the fact that the market is dead.
I am concerned that any OS that has MS support in the way of applications
is vulnerable to this sort of market-cide.
The evolution of IE is a similar story. (Even with the mistakes of
netscape, IE was no competition until version 4 ... and any other product
that couldn't compete until the fourth generation would never have gained
any market share).
When Microsoft has killed all credible browser alternatives on a platform,
they will make your only option to move to Windows to use their browser.
--
To get out of this list, please send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e
Check out the SuSE-FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/ and the
archive at http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html
