Wow, I mean, I'm young but I do remember the late 90s where every document had to be in .doc format (last I checked it's still pretty mendatory) or else no one could open it and Microsoft did everything they could to prevent other from reimplementing that format. Or how microsoft took a protocol like netbios and then smb and made it so that no one could interface with their network protocols without some crazy reverse engineering (thank you Tridge). Or how IE took over and slowly started adding incompatible stuff (look at activex and jscript as a good example) to make it impossible to work without, I still find apps that require IE6 to function. What about their attempt to re implement java and make it incompatible.
... the list goes on but show me a similar list from Google.
I do remember the late 90s where every document had to be in .doc format
How did this happen? Was Bill Gates president and make that the law? There's no way you could use WordPerfect? That was illegal? Oh, WordPerfect start sucking in the 90s didn't it, so you stopped using it like I did? But that didn't have anything to do with it, did it?
Try transfering your ad campaign from Google to Bing? It is incredibly poor fidelity. Support for the .doc format in 1997 was better than the support you get porting your ad campaign.
I'd like to have other search providers use my gmail email data. How do I do that? Oh, it's not supported? I thought it was my email? As an advertiser can I decent placement support or clickfraud data? No. OK, I'll just go to another search ad provider -- oh wait, you're the only game in town. I'll play by your rules.
1) He was saying doc was a standard and that Microsoft was ensuring no one else could create doc files. The latter part is the monopoly.
2) This is totally not a one sided problem. You think Microsoft is emailing Google to work with them on the issues? Ha.
3) You can POP/IMAP into your Gmail and download all of your email.
4) You squashed this into the same paragraph as the email thing, but yeah, that sucks. I agree. Alternatively you can use them until you are big enough and then hire someone to get ads directly from people but that doesn't help the small guy. I don't know what a noble solution is to this is - maybe everyone should agree on a format for moving ad campaigns around?
But hell, even Chrome asks on first run what search provider you want to use in a SANE way that encourages people to pick, unlike the IE of today that makes you jump through 15 screens just to get to pick a search provider.
I'd hardly say they are being monopolistic (which is the actual illegal part of being a monopoly).
You could download all your emails with pop or imap if you wanted. This has always been supported. It would have been nice to use WordPerfect but as you mention people wanted a conversion that retain the layout of the original .doc
When I can't even get a simple table from Office to WordPerfect to work properly what's the point (nothing fancy), where not talking excel formulas. If the document specs had been made available, you bet WordPerfect would have that implemented in no time. Word did have good support for WordPerfect files thus it was a one way street.
> How did this happen? Was Bill Gates president and make that the law?
He used product tying and manipulated vendors into anti-competitive agreements such that they would either use what Microsoft wanted them to use exclusively or they wouldn't be able to offer it at all.
As for how they got the initial traction, they managed to get bundled with the IBM PC. IBM back in the day used exactly the same sort of tactics ("Nobody ever got fired for using IBM" & they invented FUD), though they've reformed quite a bit since then.
WordPerfect, Borland's compilers, etc. were widely considered the best back in the day, so I don't think it was primarily the strength of Microsoft's products which made people use them.
WordPerfect, Borland's compilers, etc. were widely considered the best back in the day, so I don't think it was primarily the strength of Microsoft's products which made people use them.
My recollection of this is a fair bit different. WP seriously began to lag Word in the 90s. While WP wss the undisputed king in MSDOS, on Windows it was buggy and late. Office 95 in particular was pretty crushing.
Borland was somewhat similar. They had a good set of dev tools, and for example, their C++ compiler was blindingly fast and the VCL was relatively clean (at least compared to MFC). But around VC 4.0 that began to change (at least build speed). VC started to beat Borland in build time and seemed to spread its lead in code quality. This coupled with a better IDE made is Visual C++ become the more common choice. Although I also think the strength of VB played a large role in the uptake in VC. No data to back it up, but anecdotcally I saw a lot of ISV shops bring VC along, because they were building a lot of internal tools with VB (and no one really had anything to compete with VB).
And lets be clear... VC was never shipped as part of Windows nor any bundling of VC with OEMs. So there's no monopoly ties that help push your case that VC became dominant through some monopoly manipulation.
There are emails that say that that was due to being deliberately hampered on Bill Gate's orders, unless I'm confusing them for one of the other companies he did that sort of thing to. I think someone else linked to that already.
> And lets be clear... VC was never shipped as part of Windows nor any bundling of VC with OEMs. So there's no monopoly ties that help push your case that VC became dominant through some monopoly manipulation.
They also had access to Windows internals and such, but I will grant that they made a good product too.
Furthermore, Google actually actively fights user lock in with the "Data Liberation Front". Decide that Google has gone evil and you no longer want to use their services? Grab your data and get out. It's the exact opposite of the kind of crap Microsoft pulled.
That's not the same thing. With Word and Excel you could always save to RTF, TXT, or CSV. Plus supporting exporting to a huge host of 3rd party proprietary formats as well.
But people wanted the full fidelity of the MS file formats on different systems. Like I want the full power of GMail with a different ad provider.
Getting the data out is easy. You could do that with any version of Word/Excel. In fact, you could have built automation tools to do this, drop it into an ETL, and have it anywhere you like.
The data is rarely the full issue. It's the fidelity of service that people want.
Even basic fidelity was not possible due to some really complex issues (excel date format) which were not documented anywhere. Look at the PDF format, it's a very complex format that almost no one fully support, but the 95% of features people use are supported in a bunch of non-adobe viewers and creators. This only happened after adobe made the PDF spec open. And they still make a ton of money off Adobe Acrobat.
> With Word and Excel you could always save to RTF, TXT, or CSV.
Good luck with your formulas in CSV...
> Getting the data out is easy. You could do that with any version of Word/Excel.
Ken... I have had problems with different releases of Office (PC and Mac) importing Office documents... It was never easy. It wasn't even very predictable.
... the list goes on but show me a similar list from Google.